"Oh! that is too old-fashioned," said Mrs. Leigh, and Miss Opie coughed
dryly. But why need Bluebell have blushed so consciously, as she dashed
into Lightning galops and Tom Tiddler quadrilles, till Trove, like a dog
of taste, took his offended ears and outraged nerves off to his lair in
the lobby?

His fair mistress soon after sought her bower, a scantily furnished
retreat, but, like most girls' rooms, taking a certain amount of
individuality from its occupier. Everything in the little room was blue,
and each article a present. Photographs of school friends were suspended
from the wall with ribbons of her name-sake colour. It was in the earlier
days of the art, when a stony stare, pursed lips, and general rigidity
were considered essential to the production of the portrait.

Blue, also, were the pincushion and glass toilet implements on the
dressing-table, and a rocking-chair had its cushion embroidered in
bluebells--a tribute of affection from a late schoolfellow.

The bed was curtainless, and neutral except as to its blue valance, and
the carpet only cocoa-nut matting, which, however, harmonized fairly with
the prevailing cerulean effect.

Bluebell was writing in a book, guarded by a Bramah, some profound
reflections on "First Impressions." She never lost the key nor forgot to
lock this volume--a saving clause of common-sense protecting a farrago of
nonsence.

"Ces beaux jours, quand j'etais si malheureux." Have you ever, reader,
taken up an old journal written in early youth, and thought how those
intensely black and white days have now mingled into unnoticeable grey,
half-thankful that the old ghosts are laid, half-regretful for that
keener susceptibility to joy and sorrow gone by? Then, as "the hand
that has written it lays it aside," there is, perhaps, a pang at the
reflection of how the paths now diverge of those who once walked together
as--

"Time turns the old days to derision,
Our loves into corpses--or wives;
And marriage, and death, and division,
Make barren our lives."

But Bluebell knows nothing of that. She is at the scribbling age, and can
actually endure to describe, as if they were new and entirely original,
the dawning follies of seventeen.

In England a heroine might have wound up such sentimental exercises with
gazing out on the moonlit scene; but nine degrees below zero was
unfavourable for the wooing of Diana. The "cold light of stars" was no
poetical figure, and Bluebe