, so
that he doesn't come near the house, but I know that he and Mary meet
just the same. Thank Heaven! he will be married soon."

"Have you told Mary that?"

"Yes; but she laughs and shrugs her shoulders; evidently thinks she
knows more about Lincoln Todd's intentions than I do."

In the last week of August Mr. Todd went off for a few days "on
business," and then there came a dreadful morning when the announcement
of his marriage to Dolly Martin appeared in the _Echo_.

Mary would not believe her ears. She took the paper down to the beach,
and spelled out the notice word by word. Then she lay down on the sand
and bawled, kicking and squealing like a year-old infant when Belle
appealed to her self-respect.

"I could have spanked her well," said my wife. The worst of it was that
the whole hotel was "on to the racket," as Watty vulgarly expressed it,
and rather chuckled over Belle's mortification, instead of sympathizing
with her in the trying time she was having with her "adopted daughter."

Our grief, as a family, was not unbearable when the time came in
September for Mary Mason to go back to the convent.

CHAPTER IV.

THE self-assertive sleigh-bells suddenly ceased their tinkling, and the
long covered van, with its four horses, drew up in front of our "House
of Many Gables," in Lake City. Watty, then a tall lad of eighteen,
over-coated, fur-capped, and gloved, went quickly out, banging the front
door after him, while his younger brothers and sisters made holes with
their breath through the frost on the window panes, to watch his
departure with the hilarious load of young folks.

"Why aint you goin', Mame?" asked Joe, our smallest son, of the girl
spending her Christmas holidays with us.

"Wasn't asked," she replied defiantly. "An' what's more, I don't care to
go anywheres, neither, if the girls don't act better to me than they
done at that party the other night."

Belle raised her head from the Treasurer's book of the House of Refuge.

"Perhaps you weren't nice to them, Mary?"

"Yes, I was too. I smiled whenever one of them looked at me, but they
all turned their heads as if they'd never seen me before."

My wife sighed as she bent over her book again. If the difficulty of
befriending Mary rested only with outsiders it might have been patiently
borne, but there was mother, to whom the girl's presence in the house
was a constant grievance.

I had been able to buy a quiet horse and a Mikado cutt