"What piece?" asked Mrs. Hare.

Mr. Carlyle glanced round the room, as if fearful the very walls might
hear his whisper. "Richard's. Barbara showed it me one day when she was
turning out her desk, and said it was a curl taken off in that illness."

Mrs. Hare sank back in her chair, and hid her face in her hands,
shivering visibly. The words evidently awoke some poignant source of
deep sorrow. "Oh, my boy! My boy!" she wailed--"my boy! My unhappy boy!
Mr. Hare wonders at my ill-health, Archibald; Barbara ridicules it; but
there lies the source of all my misery, mental and bodily. Oh, Richard!
Richard!"

There was a distressing pause, for the topic admitted of neither hope
nor consolation. "Put your chain on again, Barbara," Mr. Carlyle
said, after a while, "and I wish you health to wear it out. Health and
reformation, young lady!"

Barbara smiled and glanced at him with her pretty blue eyes, so full of
love. "What have you brought for Cornelia?" she resumed.

"Something splendid," he answered, with a mock serious face; "only I
hope I have not been taken in. I bought her a shawl. The venders vowed
it was true Parisian cashmere. I gave eighteen guineas for it."

"That is a great deal," observed Mrs. Hare. "It ought to be a very good
one. I never gave more than six guineas for a shawl in all my life."

"And Cornelia, I dare say, never more than half six," laughed Mr.