own, you know."

"And Sophie, what will she say to all this?"

"Why, you know Sophie is a prime friend to both of you, and a capital
girl to keep things going. Oh, Sophie'll make a house of this, you may
depend!"

A day or two after, Bill dragged me stumbling over boxes
and through straw and wrappings to show me the glories of the
parlor-furniture,--with which he teemed pleased as a child with a new
toy.

"Look here," he said; "see these chairs, garnet-colored satin, with a
pattern on each; well, the sofa's just like them, and the curtains to
match, and the carpets made for the floor with centrepieces and borders.
I never saw anything more magnificent in my life. Sophie's governor
furnishes the house, and everything is to be A No. 1, and all that, you
see. Messrs. Curtain and Collamore are coming to make the rooms up, and
her mother is busy as a bee getting us in order."

"Why, Bill," said I, "you are going to be lodged like a prince. I hope
you'll be able to keep it up; but law-business comes in rather slowly at
first, old fellow."

"Well, you know it isn't the way I should furnish, if my capital was the
one to cash the bills; but then, you see, Sophie's people do it, and let
them,--a girl doesn't want to come down out of the style she has always
lived in."

I said nothing, but had an oppressive presentiment that social freedom
would expire in that house, crushed under a weight of upholstery.

But there came in due time the wedding and the wedding-reception, and we
all went to see Bill in his new house splendidly lighted up and complete
from top to toe, and everybody said what a lucky fellow he was; but that
was about the end of it, so far as our visiting was concerned. The
running in, and dropping in, and keeping latch-keys, and making informal
calls, that had been forespoken, seemed about as likely as if Bill had
lodged in the Tuileries.

Sophie, who had always been one of your snapping, sparkling, busy sort
of girls, began at once to develop her womanhood, and show her
principles, and was as different from her former self as your careworn,
mousing old cat is from your rollicking, frisky kitten. Not but that
Sophie was a good girl. She had a capital heart, a good, true womanly
one, and was loving and obliging; but still she was one of the
desperately painstaking, conscientious sort of women whose very blood,
as they grow older, is devoured with anxiety, and she came of a race of
women in whom house-keep