h, as we have seen.

"Well, I can't help it; you don't know, mother," Helena repeated.
"It's horrid to go to school with all those stiffies, that don't
care a snap for you, and only laugh."

"Laughing is vulgar," said Agatha. If any indirect question were
ever thrown upon the family position, Agatha immediately began
expounding the ethics of high breeding, as one who had attained.

"It is only half-way people who laugh," she said. "Ada Geoffrey and
Lilian Ashburne never laugh--_at_ anybody--I am sure."

"No, they don't; not right out. They're awfully polite. But you can
feel it, underneath. They have a way of keeping so still, when you
know they would laugh if they did anything."

"Well, they'll neither laugh nor keep still, about this. You need
not be concerned. They'll just not go, and that will be the end of
it."

Agatha Ledwith was mistaken. She had been mistaken about two things
to-night. The other was when she had said that this was the first
time Uncle Oldways had noticed or been interested in anything they
did.

X.

COCKLES AND CRAMBO.

Hazel Ripwinkley put on her nankeen sack and skirt, and her little
round, brown straw hat. For May had come, and almost gone, and it
was a day of early summer warmth.

Hazel's dress was not a "suit;" it had been made and worn two
summers before suits were thought of; yet it suited very well, as
people's things are apt to do, after all, who do not trouble
themselves about minutiae of fashion, and so get no particular
antediluvian marks upon them that show when the flood subsides.

Her mother knew some things that Hazel did not. Mrs. Ripwinkley, if
she had been asleep for five and twenty years, had lost none of her
perceptive faculties in the trance. But she did not hamper her child
with any doubts; she let her go on her simple way, under the shield
of her simplicity, to test this world that she had come into, for
herself.

Hazel had written down her little list of the girls' names that she
would like to ask; and Mrs. Ripwinkley looked at it with a smile.
There was Ada Geoffrey, the banker's daughter, and Lilian Ashburne,
the professor's,--heiresses each, of double lines of birth and
wealth. She could remember how, in her childhood, the old names
sounded, with the respect that was in men's tones when they were
spoken; and underneath were Lois James and Katie Kilburnie, children
of a printer and a hatter. They had all been chosen for their purely
personal q