When I returned to my father's house to spend a short vacation among
my earliest friends, I had entered upon my sixteenth year. I had of
course, in the interval, been visited alternately by my father and
step-mother, who kept me quite _au courant_ of all that transpired in
their fashionable world in my absence.

I had received photographs of my interesting half brother, which made
me familiar with the changes wrought in him physically, by time; but
all this had no satisfaction for me, who would rather one glimpse of
old Hannah's frilled cap, or one peep through the narrow panes of Ella
Wray's humble cottage, than all the spicy intelligences of the doings
and sayings of possibly great people, for whom, however, I cared but
very little.

At the close of our summer session of that year my father brought me
home for a visit of three months. I had grown considerably, and for a
person of tolerably good health, was very slender, which gave me the
appearance of being yet taller than I was, and I felt an instinctively
spiteful satisfaction in the consciousness that I had quite overcome
any tendencies I might ever have had towards being round-shouldered;
the regular calisthenic exercises which we went through at the convent
had made a decided change for the better in my personal appearance.

I was not long at home before I detected a resolution on the part of
my step-mother to adopt a new, and altogether plausible, attitude
towards me. I was no longer a child; that was a self-evident fact:
neither was I yet what society calls a "young lady," but now-a-days an
interesting medium has been established and acknowledged; it is the
first grade wherein the embryo society belles are initiated into all