e, I never,
never saw anything so lovely!" was entirely natural and spontaneous.

Laura stood smiling and a little flushed in the midst of her dainty
garments; and the room seemed at that moment to be full of a very
charming atmosphere of girlish admiration and pleasure. One after
another the filmy things were touched softly or held up to the light,
while the two pairs of eyes--one pair deeply glowing and the other wide
and bright--met over them in sympathetic appreciation.

"But this is the sweetest of all," said Laura happily. She was
delighted to be giving pleasure, but--beneath that--she equally enjoyed
indulging her desire to be liked by everybody. As she spoke she lifted
from the bed where it lay a most exquisitely embroidered dressing-gown
with a little cap to match.

"Yes, lovely," said Caroline. But the alteration in her tone was so
marked and so sudden that Laura turned round quite sharply to see what
the matter was: and in so doing she caught something
clouded--sullen--what was it? just passing across the other girl's
face. Why, of course--how dreadfully hard to see somebody else having
all these beautiful things while you had nothing! Her sudden
realization of this point of view was so complete that she flushed
deeply from chin to forehead. What a perfect idiot she had been--when
she only meant to be kind.

All the same she was now mistaken; that change in Caroline's expression
being caused by something entirely different from what she imagined
herself to have discovered; and she would have been both startled and
surprised had she known the actual fact. As it was, her one desire was
to somehow retrieve her mistake. She looked at her pretty things,
trying eagerly to think of something that she could give without
seeming to patronize, and her glance fell on a box of coloured
handkerchiefs, so she took it up in her hand and said carelessly: "Oh!
these don't belong here. A firm from whom I bought a great many things
sent me them, and they are a kind I never use. Still I had to keep
them. I wonder if you would take them with you out of the way?"

"Very kind--I'm sure. But you'll find a use for them," murmured
Caroline, not extending her hand. The two girls looked away from each
other, both a little discomfited; and in doing so they saw a photograph
of Wilson in a silver frame which had been covered up and which the
removal of the handkerchiefs had left exposed.

In that brief silence the atmo