"_Did_ you know mother? Are you any relation?" asked Dora,
trembling with eager expectation; and Alice, who, without her
sister's influence, would have been a comparatively kind-hearted
girl, answered softly, "We are your cousins."

There was much native politeness and natural refinement of manner
about Dora, and instinctively her little chubby hand was extended
towards her newly found relative, who pressed it gently, glancing
the while at her sister, who, without one word of sympathy for the
orphan girl, walked away through the winding passage, and down the
narrow stairs, out into the sunlight, where, breathing more
freely, she exclaimed, "What a horrid place! I hope I haven't
caught anything. Didn't Dora look like a Dutch doll in that long
dress and high-neck apron?"

"Her face is pretty, though," returned Alice, "and her eyes are
beautiful--neither blue nor black, but a mixture of both. How I
pitied her as they filled with tears when you were talking! Why
didn't you speak to her?"

"Because I'd nothing to say," answered Eugenia, stepping into the
carriage which had brought them there, and ordering the driver to
go next to Stuart's, where she wished to look again at a velvet
cloak.

"It is so cheap, and so becoming, too, that I am half tempted to
get it," she exclaimed.

"Mother won't like it, I know," said Alice, who herself began to