roved, I should say, all through," was
his answer.

Mrs. Harrowby smiled. "She is a girl I like," she said. "She is so
sensible and has such nice feeling about things."

"Yes," answered Edgar, "she is thoroughly well-bred."

"We have seen a great deal of her of late years," Mrs. Harrowby
continued, angling dexterously. "She and the girls are fast friends,
especially she and Josephine, though there is certainly some slight
difference of age between them. But Adelaide prefers their society
to that of any one about the neighborhood. And I think that of itself
shows such good taste and nice feeling."

"So it does," said Edgar with dutiful assent, not exactly seeing for
himself what constituted Adelaide's good taste and nice feeling in
this preference for his dull and doleful sisters over the brighter
companionship of the Fairbairns, say, or any other of the local
nymphs. To him those elderly maiden sisters of his were rather bores
than otherwise, but he was not displeased that Adelaide Birkett
thought differently. If it "ever came to anything," it would be better
that they satisfied her than that she should find them uncongenial.

"She is coming up to dinner this evening," Mrs. Harrowby went on to
say; and Edgar smiled, pulled his moustaches and looked half puzzled
if wholly pleased.

"She is a pretty girl," he said with the imbecility of a man who ought
to speak and who has nothing to say, also who has something that he
does not wish to say.

"She is better than pretty--she is good," returned Mrs. Harrowby;
and Edgar, not caring to discuss Adelaide on closer ground with his
mother, strolled away into his private room, where he sat before the
fire smoking, meditating on his life in the past and his prospects
in the future, and wondering how he would like it when he had finally
abjured the freedom of bachelorhood and had taken up with matrimony
and squiredom for the remainder of his natural life.

Punctually at seven Adelaide Birkett appeared. This, too, was one
of her minor virtues: she was exact. Mind, person, habits, all were
regulated with the nicest method, and she knew as little of hurry as
of delay, and as little of both as of passion.

"You are such a dear, good punctual girl!" said Josephine
affectionately--Josephine, whose virtues had a few more, loose ends
and knots untied than had her friend's.

"It is so vulgar to be unpunctual," said Adelaide with her calm
good-breeding. "It seems to me only anothe