contrast between herself and her friend. How sheltered and guarded, and
fenced in and fenced off, Christina was! how securely and safely
blooming in the sacred enclosure of fatherly and motherly care! and
Dolly--alas, alas! _her_ defences were all down, and she herself,
delicate and tender, forced into the defender's place, to shield those
who should have shielded her. It pressed on her by degrees, as the
sweet unaccustomed feeling of ease and rest made itself more and more
sensible, and by contrast she realised more and more the absence of it
in her own life. It pressed very bitterly.

The girls had just withdrawn again after dinner to the firelight
cosiness of Christina's room, when Mrs. Thayer put her head in.

"Christina, here's Baron Kraemer and Signor Count Villa Bella, come to
know if you will go to the Sistine Chapel."

"Mother!--how you put titles together! Oh, I remember; there is music
at the Sistine to-night. But Sandie might come."

"And might not," said Mrs. Thayer. "You will have time enough to see
Sandie; and this is Christmas Eve, you know. You may not be in Rome
next Christmas."

"Would you like to go, Dolly?" said Christina doubtfully.

Dolly's heart jumped at the invitation; music and the Sistine Chapel!
But it did not suit her to make an inconvenient odd one in a partie
carree, among strangers. She declined.

"I said I would go," said Mrs. Thayer. "Since the gentlemen have come
to take you, I think you had better. Dolly will not mind losing you for
an hour or two."

Which Dolly eagerly confirmed; wondering much at the same time to see
Christina hesitate, when her lover, as she said, might come at any
minute.

She, too, finally resolved against it, however; and when Mrs. Thayer
and the gentlemen had gone, and Mr. Thayer had withdrawn, as his custom
was, to his own apartment, the two girls took possession of the
forsaken drawing-room. It was a pretty room, very well furnished, and
like every other part of the present home of the Thayers, running over
with new possessions in the shape of bits of art or antiquity,
pictures, and trinkets of every kind, which they were always picking
up. These were an infinite amusement to Dolly; and Christina was
good-humouredly pleased with her pleasure.

"There's no fun in being in Rome," she remarked, "if you cannot buy all
you see. I would run away if my purse gave out."

"But there is all that you cannot take away," said Dolly. "Think of
what your mot