how to do!"

"Miss de Fortier did not come to teach me sewing and knitting, Hannah.
She taught me lessons."

"Lessons how are you! And what's become of them if she did? Oh, its a
fine way children are brought up in this country," the old woman went
on half in soliloquy; "a bit of this and a bit of that and not much of
either. I pity the housekeepers ye'll make yet. God help the poor men
that are waiting for ye. Many's the missing button and broken sock
they'll have to put up with!"

"Well, Hannah," I interrupted, beginning an impromptu justification
and defence--but Hannah was destined never to have her conviction
shaken, for just then I heard a sharp rapping at the library window,
and gathering up the fragments of my fashion-plate in my linen
pinafore, I ran outside and looked towards that end of the house. My
father was standing at the open casement, and beckoned me to go to
him. Whether from the novelty of the occurrence, or the instinctive
awe in which I stood of my father, I immediately let go the margin of
my pinafore, dropping scissors and ladies and all, in a most brusque
and heedless manner, and hastened into the library, while I was
smoothing out the wrinkled folds of my clean, starched apron.

In my excitement I had forgotten to wonder at the strange
circumstance, but when my little hand clutched the great knob of the
library door and turned it, and when the placid countenance of my
step-mother looked up at me from a comfortable easy-chair at the
opposite side of the room, I felt that some awful moment had dawned on
my existence. With as much nerve and self-control as a child usually