ed to be
on their best behavior; and yet mother finds fault from morning to
night. Dottie is crying now because she has been scolded for coming
down to tea in a dirty pinafore."

"Oh, hush, Susie dear! you ought not to say such things," returned
Grace, in her quiet voice.

Poor Grace! these visits of Archie were her only pleasures. The
brother and sister were devoted to each other. In Archie's eyes not
one of the others was to be compared to her; and in this he was
perfectly right.

Grace Drummond was a tall, sweet-looking girl of two-and-twenty,--not
pretty, except in her brother's opinion, but possessing a soft, fair
comeliness that made her pleasant to look upon. In voice and manner
she was extremely quiet,--almost grave; and only those who lived with
her had any idea of the repressed strength and energy of her
character, and the almost masculine clearness of intellect that lay
under the soft exterior. One side of her nature was hidden from every
one but her brother, and to him only revealed by intermittent flashes,
and that was the passionate absorption of her affection in him. To her
parents she was dutiful and submissive, but when she grew up the yoke
of her mother's will was felt to be oppressive. Her father's nature
was more in sympathy with her own; but even with him she was reticent.
She was good to all her brothers and sisters, and especially devoted
to Dottie; but her affection for them was so strongly pervaded by
anxiety and the overweight of responsibility that its pains
overbalanced its pleasures. She loved them, and toiled in their
service from morning to night; but as yet she had not felt herself
rewarded by any decided success. But in Archie her pride was equal to
her love; she was critical, and her standard was somewhat high, but he
satisfied her. What other people recognized as faults, she regarded
as the merest blemishes. Without being absolutely faultless, which was
of course impossible in a creature of flesh and blood, he was still as
near perfection, she thought, as he could be. Perhaps her affection
for him blinded her somewhat, and cast a sort of loving glamour over
her eyes; for it must be owned that Archibald was by no means
extraordinary in either goodness or cleverness. From a boy she had
watched his career with dazzled eyes, rejoicing in every stroke of
success that came to him as though it were her own. Her own life was
dull and laborious, spent in the overcrowded house in Lowder Stre