n Carry, in serious concern.

"Hush! Miss Walker is saying something," said Kate, laughing.

"The young ladies will please give attention," said a slow, perfunctory
voice. "Miss Carry Tretherick is wanted in the parlor."

Meantime Mr. Jack Prince, the name given on the card, and various
letters and credentials submitted to the Rev. Mr. Crammer, paced the
somewhat severe apartment known publicly as the "reception parlor," and
privately to the pupils as "purgatory." His keen eyes had taken in the
various rigid details, from the flat steam "radiator," like an
enormous japanned soda-cracker, that heated one end of the room, to the
monumental bust of Dr. Crammer, that hopelessly chilled the other;
from the Lord's Prayer, executed by a former writing-master in such
gratuitous variety of elegant calligraphic trifling as to considerably
abate the serious value of the composition, to three views of Genoa from
the Institute, which nobody ever recognized, taken on the spot by the
drawing-teacher; from two illuminated texts of Scripture in an English
Letter, so gratuitously and hideously remote as to chill all human
interest, to a large photograph of the senior class, in which the
prettiest girls were Ethiopian in complexion, and sat, apparently, on
each other's heads and shoulders. His fingers had turned listlessly the
leaves of school-catalogues, the "Sermons" of Dr. Crammer, the "Poems"
of Henry Kirke White, the "Lays of the Sanctuary" and "Lives of
Celebrated Women." His fancy, and it was a nervously active one, had
gone over the partings and greetings that must have taken place here,
and wondered why the apartment had yet caught so little of the flavor of
humanity; indeed, I am afraid he had almost forgotten the object of his
visit, when the door opened, and Carry Tretherick stood before him.

It was one of those faces he had seen the night before, prettier even
than it had seemed then; and yet I think he was conscious of some
disappointment, without knowing exactly why. Her abundant waving hair
was of a guinea-golden tint, her complexion of a peculiar flower-like
delicacy, her brown eyes of the color of seaweed in deep water. It
certainly was not her beauty that disappointed him.

Without possessing his sensitiveness to impression, Carry was, on her
part, quite as vaguely ill at ease. She saw before her one of those men
whom the sex would vaguely generalize as "nice," that is to say,
correct in all the superficial appoint