t," returned her mother, with a
sigh. "You will lose caste. No one will visit you. Among your equals
you will be treated as inferiors. It is this that bows me to the earth
with shame."

"Mother, how can you talk so?" cried Nan, in a clear, indignant voice.
"What does it matter if people do not visit us? We must have a world
of our own, and be sufficient for ourselves, if we can only keep
together. Is not that what you have said to us over and over again?
Well, we shall be together, we shall have each other. What does the
outside world matter to us after all?"

"Oh, you are young; you do not know what complications may arise,"
replied Mrs. Challoner, with the gloomy forethought of middle age.
She thought she knew the world better than they, but in reality she
was almost as guileless and ignorant as her daughters. "Until you
begin, you do not know the difficulties that will beset you," she went
on.

But notwithstanding this foreboding speech, she was some what
comforted by Nan's words: "they would be together!" Well, if
Providence chose to inflict this humiliation and afflictive
dispensation on her, it could be borne as long as she had her children
around her.

Nan made one more speech,--a somewhat stern one for her.

"Our trouble will be a furnace to try our friends. We shall know the
true from the false. Only those who are really worth the name will be
faithful to us."

Nan was thinking of Dick; but her mother misunderstood her, and grew
alarmed.

"You will not tell the Paines and the other people about here what you
intend to do, surely? I could not bear that! no, indeed, I could not
bear that!"

"Do not be afraid, dear mother," returned Nan, sadly, "we are far too
great cowards to do such a thing, and, after all, there is no need to
put ourselves to needless pain. If the Maynes were here we might not
be able to keep it from them, perhaps, and so I am thankful they are
away."

Nan said this quite calmly, though her mother fixed her eyes upon her
in a most tenderly mournful fashion. She had quite forgotten their
Longmead neighbors, but now, as Nan recalled them to her mind, she
remembered Mr. Mayne, and her look had become compassionate.

"It will be all over with those poor children," she thought to
herself: "the father will never allow it,--never; and I cannot wonder
at him." And then her heart softened to the memory of Dick, whom she
had never thought good enough for Nan, for she remembered now with a