Her movements, like those of most little women, were light and quick
rather than elegant; yet every thing she did was done with a neatness
and delicacy which gave an involuntary sense of grace and harmony.
She was, in brief, one of those people who are best described by the
word "harmonious;" people who never set your teeth on edge, or rub
you up the wrong way, as very excellent people occasionally do. Yet
she was not over-meek or unpleasantly amiable; there was a liveliness
and even briskness about her, as if the every day wine of her life
had a spice of Champagniness, not frothiness but natural
effervescence of spirit, meant to "cheer but not inebriate" a
household.

And in her own household this gift was most displayed. No centre of a
brilliant, admiring circle could be more charming, more witty, more
irresistibly amusing than was Hilary sitting by the kitchen fire,
with the cat on her knee, between her two sisters, and the school-boy
Ascott Leaf, their nephew--which four individuals, the cat being not
the least important of them, constituted the family.

In the family, Hilary shone supreme. All recognized her as the light
of the house, and so she had been, ever since she was born, ever
since her

"Dying mother mild,
Said, with accents undefiled,
'Child, be mother to this child.'"

It was said to Johanna Leaf--who was not Mrs. Leaf's own child. But
the good step-mother, who had once taken the little motherless girl
to her bosom, and never since made the slightest difference between