ink in, but it seemed to make no impression until she
looked up at Nancy Ellen's very feet and said: "Well, how do you like
it?"

"Good gracious!" cried Nancy Ellen. "I thought I was having a stylish
caller. I didn't know you! Why, I never saw YOU walk that way before."

"You wouldn't expect me to plod along as if I were plowing, with a
thing like this on my head, would you?"

"I wouldn't expect you to have a thing like that on your head; but
since you have, I don't mind telling you that you are stunning in it,"
said Nancy Ellen.

"Better and better!" laughed Kate, sitting down on the step. "The
milliner said it was a stunning HAT."

"The goose!" said Nancy Ellen. "You become that hat, Kate, quite as
much as the hat becomes you."

The following day, dressed in a linen suit of natural colour, with the
black bow at her throat, the new hat in a bandbox, and the renewed
sailor on her head, Kate waved her farewells to Nancy Ellen and Robert
on the platform, then walked straight to the dressing room of the car,
and changed the hats. Nancy Ellen had told her this was NOT the thing
to do. She should travel in a plain untrimmed hat, and when the dust
and heat of her journey were past, she should bathe, put on fresh
clothing, and wear such a fancy hat only with her best frocks, in the
afternoon. Kate need not have been told that. Right instincts and
Bates economy would have taught her the same thing, but she had a
perverse streak in her nature. She had SEEN herself in the hat.

The milliner, who knew enough of the world and human nature to know how
to sell Kate the hat, when she never intended to buy it, and knew she
should not in the way she did, had said that before fall it would bring
her a carriage, which put into bald terms meant a rich husband. Now
Kate liked her school and she gave it her full attention; she had done,
and still intended to keep on doing, first-class work in the future;
but her school, or anything pertaining to it, was not worth mentioning
beside Nancy Ellen's HOME, and the deep understanding and strong
feeling that showed so plainly between her and Robert Gray. Kate
expected to marry by the time she was twenty or soon after; all Bates
girls had, most of them had married very well indeed. She frankly
envied Nancy Ellen, while it never occurred to her that any one would
criticise her for saying so. Only one thing could happen to her that
would surpass what had come to her sister. If o