as she left the
dais, she had glanced up and made out her mother's little nutcracker
face, so like her own, in one of the circles of faces overhead.

There was a little group in the balcony watching Mary with fond pride.
Lady Anne Hamilton's face shone again as the tall, slender young figure
went up amid the furious applause of the undergraduates, through which
the general clapping of hands could hardly be heard. Behind Lady Anne
were Mary's father and stepmother. Lady Anne had taken care that they
should not be forgotten in the distribution of tickets. Walter Gray
looked on quietly. He was very proud of his girl; but he had, perhaps,
too great a wisdom to set much store by the plaudits of the many. Mrs.
Gray, in a bonnet Mary had made for her and a mantle which had been
Mary's gift, was in a timid rapture. She was older by some years than
she had been when Mary went to Lady Anne first, but she was far more
comely. Her family seemed to have reached its limits, for one thing, and
she was no more the helpless drudge she had been. Several of the
children were at school, and that wonderfully elastic salary of Mary's
had done miraculous things in the way of bringing comfort and even
refinement to Walter Gray's home.

"Well," said Lady Anne, turning round, and touching Walter Gray's arm,
"I have not made too bad a fairy godmother, have I, now?"

"She would never have grown so tall," Walter Gray said, with absent
eyes. He had yielded up Mary for her good, but he had never ceased to
miss her.

One person who sat among the most distinguished group in the Hall looked
at Mary with a lively interest.

"What a charming girl!" she said to her host, a very great person.

"I believe she has been adopted as a sort of companion by old Lady Anne
Hamilton, who is a cousin of my wife's," he responded. "The girl has
been educated at her expense. Yes, it's a pretty thing. I only hope it
won't become a blue-stocking."

"I must positively know her," said the lady. "She interests me."

"You make me jealous," returned the great person, with playful
gallantry.

Lady Agatha had been a peeress in her own right since she had attained
the tender age of two years. Her father and mother had died too early
for her to miss them, and she had shown from her childhood a capacity to
think for herself, which nurses and governesses and all such persons
looked on as absolutely shocking. She had had a guardian, a soft,
woolly, comfortable gentleman wh