Laura sat the other side of me, and softly touched me. So I only
asked, if that great star up there was Lyra; but all the time Anodyne,
Ambergris, Abner, Albion, Alpheus, and all the names that begin with A,
rolled through my memory monotonously and continually.

After we went up-stairs that night, and while I was trying in vain to do
up my hair so as to make a natural wave in front, (sometimes everything
goes wrong,) Laura said,--

"Delphine!"

My mother mixed romance with good practical sense, and very properly
said that girls with good names and tolerable faces might get on in the
world, but it took fortune to make your Sallies and Mollies go down. She
had good taste, too, and didn't name either of us Louisa Prudence, like
an unfortunate I once saw; and we were left, with our nice cottage
covered with its vine of bitter-sweet and climbing rose, fifteen hundred
dollars each, and our names, Delphine and Laura. Not a bad heritage,
with economy, good looks, and hearts to take life cheerily. Still it
is plain enough that a fifty-dollar note for the bride was not to be
despised nor overlooked. In fact, with the exception of Polly's present
of a brown earthen bowl and a pudding-stick, it was the first approach
to a wedding-gift that I had yet received. And this note was trouble the
second. But of that, by-and-by.

"Delphine!" said Laura, softly.

Some people's voices excoriate you, Laura's was soft and soothing.