not
have spoken a word for worlds.

As she sat there on the edge of one of Mrs. Carruthers' chairs--the
drawing-room furniture was of the sparsest; a chair or small table
dotted here and there on the wilderness of polished floor--she could see
herself in a pier-glass at the other end of the room. It was a quite
unfamiliar presentment she saw. This Mary was dressed in soft dove-grey.
She had a little white muslin folded fichu about her shoulders. She had
a wide black hat, with one long white ostrich feather. Her good hand was
gloved in delicate grey kid. There was something quaint about her
aspect; for that artist, Simmons, had discovered that Mary, for all her
fifteen years, looked her best with her soft fine brown hair piled on
top of her head. When she presented Mary so to Lady Anne the old lady
was fain to acknowledge that Simmons was right. There was a quaint and
delightful stateliness about Mary which made Lady Anne say to herself
once more that the child had gentle blood in her.

"Dear me," Mildred Carruthers thought, as her eyes wandered again and
again to the elegant little figure, "Kit said nothing of this. I
expected to find a rather interesting child of the humbler classes. I
remember particularly that he said she looked as though she had had a
hard time."

Mary's changed aspect had one unforeseen result. When she presented
herself at Wistaria Terrace the baby did not know her. Her stepmother
shed a few tears, which were half-gratification. The elder children were
already a bit shy of her, the baby's immediate predecessor even
murmuring of her as "the yady," and surveying her from afar, finger in
mouth. But the baby could in no way be brought to recognise her, and
only shouted lustily when she tried to force herself upon his
recognition.

"I shall come to-morrow in my old frock," Mary said, bitterly hurt by
this lack of perception on the baby's part. "I hate these hideous
things; so I do. To-morrow he will come to his Mary, so he will."

But when the morrow came, and she sought for her old work-a-day garments
in that pretty white and blue wardrobe where she had hung them when she
had discarded them for the grey frock and hat, they were not to be
found. There were numbers of things such as Mary had never dreamed of.
Lady Anne had provided her with an outfit, simple according to her
thoughts, but splendid in Mary's eyes. A white cashmere dressing-gown,
trimmed with lace, hung on the peg where the grey li