wound. The Ayletts were a stately race, and the few who, while she
was in her teens, had carped at her lack of pride because of her
disposition to choose friends from the walks of life lower than her
own, and criticised as unbecoming the playful familiarity that
caused underlings and plebeians--the publicans and sinners of the
aristocrat's creed--to worship the ground on which she trod--the
censors in the court of etiquette conferred upon her altered
demeanor the patent of their approbation, averring, for the
thousandth time, that good blood would assert itself in the long run
and bring forth the respectable fruits of refinement, self-
appreciation, and condescension. The change had come over her by
perceptible, but not violent, stages of progression, dating--Mrs.
Sutton saw with pain; Rosa, with enforced respect--from the sunset
hour in which she had read her brother's sentence of condemnation
upon her then betrothed, now estranged, lover. After that one
evening, she had not striven to conceal herself and her hurt in
solitude. Neither had she borrowed from desperation a brazen helmet
to hide the forehead the cruel letter had, for a brief space, laid
low in the dust of anguished humiliation.

If a whisper of her disappointment and the attendant incidents crept
through the ranks of her associates, it died away for want of
confirmation in her clear level-lidded eyes, elastic footfall and
the willingness and frequency with which she appeared and played her
part in the various scenes of gayety that made the winter succeeding
her brother's marriage one long to be remembered by the
pleasure-seekers of the vicinity. She had not disdained the
assistance of her sister-in-law's judgment and experience in the
choice of the dresses that were to grace these merry-makings, and,
thanks to her own naturally excellent taste, now tacitly disputed