hazel eyes, and a forehead with a look of expansion, partly due to
the crisp waves of dark hair being as short as a boy's. The nose was
well cut, and each delicate nostril was quivering involuntarily with
emotion—-or fright, or both.

Mrs. Brownlow kissed her, made her rest on the sofa, and talked to
her, the shy monosyllabic replies lengthening every time as the
motherliness drew forth a response, until, when conducted to the
cheerful little room which Mrs. Brownlow had carefully decked with
little comforts for the convalescent, and with the ornaments likely
to please a girl's eye, she suddenly broke into a little
irrepressible cry of joy and delight. "Oh! oh! how lovely! Am I to
sleep here? Oh! it is just like the girls' rooms I always _did_ long
to see! Now I shall always be able to think about it."

"My poor child, did you never even see such a room ?"

"No; I slept in the attic with the maid at old Aunt Mary's, and
always in a cubicle after I went to the asylum. Some of the girls
who went home in the holidays used to describe such rooms to us, but
they could never have been so nice as this! Oh! oh! Mrs. Brownlow,
real lilies of the valley! Put there for me! Oh! you dear,
delicious, pearly things! I never saw one so close before!"

"Never before." That was the burthen of the song of the little bird
with wounded wing who had been received into this nest. She had the
dimmest remembrance of home or mother, something a little clearer of
her sojourn at her aunt's, though there the aunt had been an invalid
who kept her in restraint in her presence, and her pleasures had been
in the kitchen and in a few books, probably 'Don Quixote' and