suddenly blossomed into prettiness.

"Carrotina--why, what's happened to you?" said her father to her one day.

She turned in astonishment from her task of putting some books tidy on
his study shelves. Then she coloured half angrily.

"I must put my hair up some time, I suppose," she said resentfully. There
was something in the abruptness of her father's question, no less than in
the new closeness and sharpness of eye with which he was examining her,
that annoyed her.

"Well! you've made a young lady of yourself. I dare say I mustn't call
you nicknames any more!"

"I don't mind," she said indifferently, going on with her work, while he
looked at the golden-red mass she had coiled round her little head, with
an odd half-welcome sense of change, a sudden prescience of the future.

Then she turned again.

"If--if you make any absurd changes," she said, with a frown, "I'll--I'll
cut it all off!"

"You'd better not; there'd be ructions," he said laughing. "It's not
yours till you're twenty-one."

And to himself he said, "Gracious! I didn't bargain for a pretty
daughter. What am I to do with her? Augustina'll never get her married."