this morning. Please discourage any signs of vanity."

"She hasn't a particle of vanity!" Miss White said warmly.

But in spite of such assurances, Mr. Ferguson was always falling
into bleakly apprehensive thoughts of his little girl,
obstinately denying his pride in her, and allowing himself only
the meager hope that she would "turn out fairly decently." Vanity
was his especial concern, and he was more than once afraid he had
discovered it: Elizabeth was not allowed to go to dancing-school--
dancing and vanity were somehow related in her uncle's mind; so
the vital, vivid little creature expressed the rhythm that was in
her by dancing without instruction, keeping time with loud,
elemental cadences of her own composing, not always melodious,
but always in time. Sometimes she danced thus in the school-room;
sometimes in Mrs. Todd's "ice-cream parlor" at the farther end of
Mercer's old wooden bridge; once--and this was one of the
occasions when Mr. Ferguson thought he had detected the vice he
dreaded--once she danced in his very own library! Up and down she
went, back and forth, before a long mirror that stood between the
windows. She had put a daffodowndilly behind each ear, and
twisted a dandelion chain around her neck. She looked, as she
came and went, smiling and dimpling at herself in the shadowy
depths of the mirror, like a flower--a flower in the wind!--
bending and turning and swaying, and singing as she danced: "Oh,
isn't it joyful--joyful--joyful!"

It was then that her uncle came upon her; for just a moment he
stood still in involuntary delight, then remembered his theories;
there was certainly vanity in her primitive adornment! He knocked