and never show any one, knowing the slightness of their merit. Nanny,
the younger, had read a great many novels with a keen sense of their
inaccuracy as representations of life, and had seen a great deal of
life with a sad regret for its difference from fiction. They were both
nice girls, accomplished, well-dressed of course, and well enough
looking; but they had met no one at the seaside or the mountains whom
their taste would allow to influence their fate, and they had come home
to the occupations they had left, with no hopes and no fears to
distract them.

In the absence of these they were fitted to take the more vivid
interest in their brother's affairs, which they could see weighed upon
their mother's mind after the first hours of greeting.

"Oh, it seems to have been going on, and your father has never written
a word about it," she said, shaking her head.

"What good would it have done?" asked Nanny, who was little and fair,
with rings of light hair that filled a bonnet-front very prettily; she
looked best in a bonnet. "It would only have worried you. He could
not have stopped Tom; you couldn't, when you came home to do it."

"I dare say papa didn't know much about it," suggested Lily. She was a
tall, lean, dark girl, who looked as if she were not quite warm enough,
and whom you always associated with wraps of different aesthetic effect
after you had once seen her.

It is a serious matter always to the women of his family when a young
man gives them cause to suspect that he is interested in some other
woman. A son-in-law or brother-in-law does not enter the family; he
need not be caressed or made anything of; but the son's or brother's
wife has a claim upon his mother and sisters which they cannot deny.
Some convention of their sex obliges them to show her affection, to
like or to seem to like her, to take her to their intimacy, however
odious she may be to them. With the Coreys it was something more than
an affair of sentiment. They were by no means poor, and they were not
dependent money-wise upon Tom Corey; but the mother had come, without
knowing it, to rely upon his sense, his advice in everything, and the
sisters, seeing him hitherto so indifferent to girls, had insensibly
grown to regard him as altogether their own till he should be released,
not by his marriage, but by theirs, an event which had not approached
with the lapse of time. Some kinds of girls--they believed that they
could readil