?" asked the
child frowning half absently over her doll, whose arm she was
struggling to force into rather a tight sleeve of her own
manufacture.

"Well, perhaps she might not exactly understand. People always went
by their names when she was a child, and now hardly anybody does.
She was very particular about having you called for her, and you
_are_, you know. I always write 'Desire Ledwith' in all your books,
and--well, I always _shall_ write it so, and so will you. But you
can be Daisy when we make much of you here at home, just as Florence
is Flossie."

"No, I can't," said the little girl, very decidedly, getting up and
dropping her doll. "Aunt Desire, away up in Hanover, is thinking all
the time that there is a little Desire Ledwith growing up down here.
I don't mean to have her cheated. I'm going to went by my name, as
she did. Don't call me Daisy any more, all of you; for I shan't
come!"

The gray eyes sparkled; the whole little face scintillated, as it
were. Desire Ledwith had a keen, charged little face; and when
something quick and strong shone through it, it was as if somewhere
behind it there had been struck fire.

She was true to that through all the years after; going to school
with Mabels and Ethels and Graces and Ediths,--not a girl she knew
but had a pretty modern name,--and they all wondering at that stiff
little "Desire" of hers that she would go by. When she was twelve
years old, the old lady up in Hanover had died, and left her a gold
watch, large and old-fashioned, which she could only keep on a stand
in her room,--a good solid silver tea-set, and all her spoons, and
twenty-five shares in the Hanover Bank.

Mrs. Megilp called her Daisy, with gentle inadvertence, one day
after that. Desire lifted her eyes slowly at her, with no other
reply in her face, or else.

"You might please your mother now, I think," said Mrs. Megilp.
"There is no old lady to be troubled by it."

"A promise isn't ever dead, Mrs. Megilp," said Desire, briefly. "I
shall keep our words."

"After all," Mrs. Megilp said privately to the mother, "there is
something quietly aristocratic in an old, plain, family name. I
don't know that it isn't good taste in the child. Everybody
understands that it was a condition, and an inheritance."

Mrs. Megilp had taken care of that. She was watchful for the small
impressions she could make in behalf of her particular friends. She
carried about with her a little social circumference