and they had brought a neat English
serving-woman, who seemed to know her business marvellously well and be
by no means unaccustomed to travelling.

"Aunt and niece!" commented one gentleman, surveying Dolly over his
soup. "A nice little creature,--the niece." And he mentally resolved to
cultivate her acquaintance. But it was not such an easy matter. The new
arrivals were unlike ordinary tourists in other respects than in
their settled mode of life. They did not seem to care to form chance
acquaintance with their fellow guests. They lived quietly and, unless
when driving out together or taking short, unfatiguing strolls, remained
much in their own apartments. They appeared at the _table d'hote_
occasionally; but though they were pleasant in manner they were not
communicative, and so, after a week or so, people tired of asking
questions about them and lapsed into merely exchanging greetings,
and looking on with some interest at any changes they observed in the
pretty, transparent, though always bright face, and the pliant, soft
young figure.

Thus Miss MacDowlas and her companion "tried Switzerland."

"It will do you good, my dear, and brace you up," the elder lady had
said; and from the bottom of her heart she had hoped it would.

And did it?

Well, the last time Dolly had "tried Switzerland," she had tried it in
the capacity of Lady Augusta's governess, and she had held in charge
a host of rampant young Bilberrys, who secretly loathed their daily
duties, and were not remarkable in the matter of filial piety, and were
only reconciled to existence by the presence of their maternal parent's
greatest trial, that highly objectionable Dorothea Crewe. So, taking
Lady Augusta in conjunction with her young charges, the girl had often
felt her lot by no means the easiest in the world; but youth and spirit,
and those oft-arriving letters, had helped her to bear a great deal,
and so there was still something sweet about the memory. Oh, those
old letters--those foolish, passionate, tender letters--written in the
dusty, hot London office, read with such happiness, and answered on such
closely penned sheets of foreign paper! How she had used to watch for
them, and carry them to her small bedroom and read them again and again,
kneeling on the floor by the open window, the fresh, soft summer breezes
from the blue lake far below stirring her hair and kissing her forehead!
How doubly and trebly fair she had been wont to fancy everyt