lfuls
of tea, and watched the water into the teapot--he superintended her
warming the cups, and putting a drop into each saucer. "Ah!" said Ethel,
with a concluding sigh, "it makes one hotter than double equations!"

It was all right, as Flora allowed with a slightly superior smile. She
thought Richard would never succeed in making a notable or elegant woman
of Ethel, and it was best that the two sisters should take different
lines. Flora knew that, though clever and with more accomplishments,
she could not surpass Ethel in intellectual attainments, but she was
certainly far more valuable in the house, and had been proved to have
just the qualities in which her sister was most deficient. She did not
relish hearing that Ethel wanted nothing but attention to be more than
her equal, and she thought Richard mistaken. Flora's remembrance of
their time of distress was less unmixedly wretched than it was with the
others, for she knew she had done wonders.

The next day Norman told Ethel that he had got on very well with the
verses, and finished them off late at night. He showed them to her
before taking them to school on Monday morning, and Ethel thought
they were the best he had ever written. There was too much spirit and
poetical beauty for a mere schoolboy task, and she begged for the foul
copy to show it to her father. "I have not got it," said Norman. "The
foul copy was not like these; but when I was writing them out quite
late, it was all I don't know how. Flora's music was in my ears, and the
room seemed to get larger, and like an ocean cave; and when the candle
flickered, 'twas like the green glowing light of the sun through the
waves."

"As it says here," said Ethel.

"And the words all came to me of themselves in beautiful flowing Latin,
just right, as if it was anybody but myself doing it, and they ran off
my pen in red and blue and gold, and all sorts of colours; and fine
branching zig-zagging stars, like what the book described, only
stranger, came dancing and radiating round my pen and the candle. I
could hardly believe the verses would scan by daylight, but I can't find
a mistake. Do you try them again."

Ethel scanned. "I see nothing wrong," she said, "but it seems a shame to
begin scanning Undine's verses, they are too pretty. I wish I could copy
them. It must have been half a dream."

"I believe it was; they don't seem like my own."

"Did you dream afterwards?"

He shivered. "They had got into my he