He had not considered her prettiness at first; now it seemed as if she was exquisitely fair, with that soft pink in her cheeks.

"Yes. Do you not believe you would go to please him, and see? And you might not like her, and she might not like you. But sometimes people do take sudden fancies. What do you think, looking at it out of an American girl's eyes?"

"I should go for my father's sake."

There was such a delicate gravity in her clear eyes as she raised them a little.

"Thank you," he returned softly. "What an odd thing to talk of in the midst of our dancing! When you are older, you will find people making a confidante of you very often, you seem so serious and truthful."

They were coming down to the end of the winding chain; Mr. and Mrs.

Jasper stood there. One more figure, and the cornet and horns and violins gave three long breaths of melody and stopped.

"My dear children," said Mrs. Jasper, as she stretched out her hand.

"Daisy, you will be in bed all day to-morrow! Your mother will never trust me with you again, Hanny; I didn't think it would be so long."

"But it was so delightful, mamma." Daisy was in a tumult of pleasure.

"We must go at once. Mr. Jasper will be back by the time we have found our wraps. Doctor, I can't thank you for making such a patient martyr of yourself, only you are always so good. Hanny, have you had a nice time?"

"It has been splendid," with a long, long breath, and shining lights in her eyes.

Delia went to the dressing-room with them.

"I'm going to have two more dances," she said. "It is the first real ball I've been to in a long while. I'm so glad you came. Ben says he never imagined you were so pretty. Think of that, from one's own brother! And Daisy did not shine you down, either."

Hanny kissed her with a sort of rapture. She couldn't understand; she seemed to be walking on the azure clouds instead of solid earth.

Mr. Andersen went to the carriage with them, and said he should surely call when he returned from Philadelphia.

Daisy leaned her head down on her mother's shoulder. She was more tired than she would admit. Hanny's eyes were like stars, and her brain was still filled with wonderful melodies and light airy figures trooping to the ravishing sounds, the shimmering light and sparkle. Doctor Joe just carried her up the steps, and opened the door with his latch-key. But Mrs. Underhill had heard them, and she came downstairs, wrapped in a shawl.

"Oh, Joe, how could you keep her out so late! Do you know it's almost three o'clock?"

Then the mother folded her to her heart. It seemed as if she had been snatched from some great danger; and now that she had her safe and sound, she felt as if she should never let her go again.

"You're all excitement, Hanny; you tremble like a leaf. Such dissipations are bad for growing girls."

"Oh, mother, I think I'm done growing," Hanny laughed, with a soft ring of music in her voice. "I have wanted to be tall like Margaret; but now I do not mind a bit. I think I shall always be father's little girl. And the dancing was so delightful; but you can't think how queer and long the supper was. And Mr. Thackeray really shook hands with me. He has two little girls, and they haven't any mother. If you could have seen Daisy!

And she dances beautifully."

"Hanny, your tongue runs like a mill-race. Do keep still, child. Cynthia has you pinned in every fashion. I hope your dress looked nice enough for a little girl. There, I'll take care of them all. You will never want to get up in the morning."

When she had hung the dress out of sight, she felt as if she had her little girl once more. And the little girl fell asleep to the sound of the most delicious music ever floating through one's brain.

CHAPTER XIX

THE COURSE OF TRUE LOVE

Yes, Hanny Underhill was a little girl again in gaiter-length dresses, and her braids tied across at the back of her head. They let her sleep until the latest moment; and then she had to hurry off to school. But her eyes were bright; and she could have danced along the street, if it had been the proper thing to do.

Daisy did not fare so well. She had a headache, and was very languid.

Joe said Hanny had better not go down; and that Daisy would be all right to-morrow. So Hanny studied her lessons, and began to read "Vanity Fair"

aloud to grandmother. But grandmother said she didn't care about such a silly girl as Amelia; and though there were wretched women in the world, she didn't believe any one ever was quite so scheming and heartless as Becky.

Then Hanny told her father about the dancing, and the partners she had, and Mr. Andersen, who was going back to Germany to marry some distant cousin. Altogether, it was a splendid time, only she felt as if there had been some kind of a Cinderella transformation; and that she was safe only as long as she wore short frocks.

A week afterward, Mr. Andersen returned to the city, and Hanny was invited down to tea at the Jaspers. They had a nice time, only the talk was not quite so charming as when it was interspersed with dancing.

He was to go to Paris also. And now Louis Napoleon had followed in the footsteps of his illustrious uncle, and was really Emperor of France.

What a strange, romantic history his had been!

After this, life went on with tolerable regularity. There was plenty of amusement. Old New York did not suffer. Laura Keene thrilled them with the "Hunchback," and many another personation. Matilda Heron was doing some fine work in Milman's "Fazio," and the play of "The Stranger" held audiences spell-bound. Then there were lectures for the more sober-minded people; and you heard youngish men who were to be famous afterward. Spirit-rappings had fallen a trifle into disfavour; and phrenology was making converts. It was the proper thing to go to Fowler's and have your head examined, and get a chart, which sort of settled you until something else came along. Young ladies were going into Combe's physiology and hygiene and cold bathing. Some very hardy and courageous women were studying medicine. Emerson was in a certain way rivalling Carlyle. Wendell Phillips was enchanting the cities with his silver tongue. There had been Brooke Farm; and Margaret Fuller had flashed across the world, married her Italian lover, who fought while she wrote for liberty; and husband, wife, and child had met their tragic death in very sight of her native land.

People were thinking really great thoughts; and there was a ferment of moral, transcendental, and aesthetical philosophy. Women met to discuss them in each other's parlours, prefiguring the era of clubs. Alice and Ph[oe]be Cary's receptions had grown to be quite the rage; and Anne C.

Lynch was another figure in the social-literary world. Beecher was drawing large audiences in Brooklyn, and telling the old truths in a new fashion. There is always a great seething and tumult before the water fairly boils and precipitates the dregs to the bottom.

But whatever comes and goes, young girls are always growing up with the flush and fragrance and elusive fascinations of spring. To-day, a credulous tenderness and overwhelming faith in the past; to-morrow, a little doubtful, hesitatingly anticipative, with the watchwords of "The True, the Good, and the Beautiful;" and still concerned in the latest style of doing one's back hair, and if silver combs and gilt pins would keep in fashion; and flushing celestial rosy red, yet with an odd sense of importance, when men began to lift their hats in a gravely polite manner, as if the laughing, hoydenish girl of yesterday, who strung herself out four or five wide on the sidewalk with books in hand, was the shy, refined, hesitating, utterly delicious young woman of to-day.

There were times when Hanny stood on the mysterious borderland. She used to steal up and look at the wraith of a ball-dress hanging in the third-floor closet, put away with the "choice" garments. The skirt looked so long, almost uncanny. She could see the girl who had gone to the banquet, who had danced with young men who asked "the pleasure" with the politest inclination of the head. And, oh, the lovely dances she had with Mr. Andersen! The bewitching Spanish movement floated through her brain; and the young man's voice--what a curious, lingering sweetness it had--went over her like a wave of music. Of course his German cousin would fall in love with him,--how could she help it?--and they would marry. They would go to Paris once a year or so, when business took him; they would go over to London; but their real home would be in some German town, or maybe in the castle from which the pretty grandmother had run away with her American lover. She was so glad there were real romances left in the world. It wasn't likely any would happen to her.

She was not tall, nor elegant, nor handsome; and though she could sing "Bonnie Doon," "Annie Laurie," "A Rose-tree in Full Bearing," and "The Girl I Left behind me," for her father, she was not a company singer.

But she really didn't mind. Her father would want her. She wasn't quite resigned to being an old maid; but then she need not worry until she was twenty-five. And when you came to that, half the relatives were fighting for Miss Cynthia Blackfan; and Mr. Erastus Morgan had invited her over to Paris to see the new Emperor, who was copying in every way his granduncle who had ruled half Europe.

Then she would close the closet door and run blithely downstairs with a bit of song. That was Miss Nan Underhill up there; and in her short school-girl frock she was plain household Hanny.

But they had delightful times. Doctor Joe bought a new buggy, very wide in the seat, and used to take her and Daisy out when the days were pleasant. Then Charles and Josie came over evenings, or they went to Mrs. Dean's, and talked and sang and discussed their favourite poems and stories, and thought how rich the world was growing, and wondered how their grandfathers and grandmothers had existed!

The little rue in the Underhills' cup became sweetened presently with the balm of love and forbearance, that time or circumstances usually brings about when truth and good sense are at the helm.

Matters had gone rather hard with Delia Whitney of late. In a certain fashion, she had come to the parting of the intellectual ways. People were as eager then as now to discover new geniuses. There were not so many writing, and it was easier to gain a hearing. She had been successful. She had been praised; her stories and poems were accepted, published, and paid for. She had been made much of by her brother's friends, and some of the literary women she had met.

She began to realise it was not altogether wandering at one's sweet will, unless one had a garden of unfailing bloom in which to gather the flowers of poetry, or even prose. There were greater heights than even girlhood's visions. But there must be training and study to reach them, and she had been lilting along in a desultory way, like a careless child.

But had she any real genius? When she bent her whole mind to the cultivation of every energy, what if she should find it was energy and imagination merely? Her novel did not progress to her satisfaction.

Characters might be common-place; but there was to be force enough in their delineation to keep the attention of the reader. They must be clear-cut, vivid; and hers seemed all too much alike, with no salient points.

"Do you suppose no one ever felt discouraged before?" asked Ben, with his brave, sweet smile. "That's no sign."

"But if I really wasn't a genius? And I have had so many splendid plans and plots in my brain; but when they come out, they are flat and weak. I don't ever expect to stand on the top-most round; but I can't stay down at the bottom always. I would rather not be anywhere."

Ben comforted her in his quiet fashion.

"Oh, what should I do without you!" she cried. "I want to achieve something for your sake."

"You will achieve. And if you do not, there is enjoyment left. You inspire other people."