d deportment that did infinite honour to the
polite instruction of her _pension_.

Mrs. Rothesay, confused with all that had happened, did not ask many
questions, but only said as she retired,

"I don't quite like her, Olive--I don't like the tone of her voice; and
yet there was something that struck me in the touch of her hand--which
is so different in different people."

"Hers is a very pretty hand, mamma. It is quite classic in shape--like
poor papa's--which I remember so well!"

"There never was such a beautiful hand as your papa's. He said it
descended in the Rothesay family. You have it, you know, my child,"
observed Mrs. Rothesay. She sighed, but softly; for, after all these
years, the widow and the fatherless had learned to speak of their loss
without pain, though with tender remembrance.

Thinking of him and of her mother, Olive thought, likewise, how much
happier was her own lot than that of the orphan-girl, who, by her own
confession, had never known what it was to remember the love of the
dead, or to rejoice in the love of the living. And her heart was moved
with the pity--nay, even tenderness, for Christal Manners.

When she had assisted her mother to bed--as she always did--Olive, in
passing down stairs, moved by some feeling of interest, listened at the
door of the young stranger. She was apparently walking up and down her
room with a quick, hurried step. Olive knocked.

"Are you quite comfortable?--do you want anything?"

"Who's there? Oh! come in, Miss Rothesay."

Olive entered, and found, to her surprise, that the candle was
extinguished.

"I thought I heard you moving about, Miss Manners."

"So I was. I felt restless and could not sleep. I am very tired with my
journey, I suppose, and the room is strange to me. Come here--give me
your hand."

"You are not afraid, my dear child?" said Olive, remembering that she
was, indeed, little more than a child, though she looked so womanly.
"You are not frightening yourself in this gloomy old house, nor thinking
of ghosts and goblins?"

"No--no! I was thinking, if I must tell the truth," said the girl, with
something very like a suppressed sob--"I was thinking of you and your
mother, as I saw you standing when I first came in. No one ever clasped
me so, or ever will! Not that I have any one to blame; my father and
mother died; they could not help dying. But if they had just brought me
into the world and left me, as I have heard some parents have d