"Doris, mother thinks you had better unpack your trunk. Your dresses will be rumpled lying in it so long." "You unpack it, like a dear! I shall ruin my things taking them out; and then, I can't go in, it is so lovely out-of-doors." "Did you not put the things in, to begin with?" asked Mattie. "No, dear; one of the girls did. The _girls_ loved to wait on me, Mattie!" This with sweet reproach. "But mother thinks you are keeping Earle from work." "Go away, Earle!" said Doris, giving him a dainty little push. "If you stay idle here, I am to be called in and set to work. After that stuffy old school this four years, I cannot stay indoors. Go, Mattie, and tell mother if she insists on my coming in, I shall appeal at once to my fairy godmother to turn me into a butterfly." Mattie walked slowly away. "That's all right," said Doris, with satisfaction. "They all end by letting me have my own way." "And how does that work?" "Well. Don't you suppose it is always a very nice way?" "It must be, indeed," said Earle, heartily. He thought to himself that so charming a form must shrine only the tenderest of hearts, the sweetest of souls, and her way must always be a good way. The girl was infinitely more lovely than one could look for in the child of Mark and Patty Brace, the sister of gentle Mattie; but being the child of Mark and Patty, and sister of Mattie, she must be a sharer in their goodness, that sterling honesty, that generous unselfishness, that made these three everywhere beloved and respected, patterns of domestic and neighborly virtues. Thus thinking, Earle sunned himself in the radiance of her smiles. CHAPTER X. A WASTED WARNING. While Earle Moray watched Doris, and lost himself in delicious fancies of a soul fair as the body that shrined it, Doris, on her part, gazed on him with awakening interest. She had expected to see a young countryman, a rhymster who believed himself a poet, one with whom she could "flirt to pass away the time," and "to keep in practice"--not this gentleman in air and dress, with the cultivated musical voice, the noble face, the truthful, earnest eye. Said Doris in her heart, "I did not know that little dairy-maid Mattie had such good taste;" and in proportion as the value of Mattie's love increased before her, so increased her joy in winning it away. Not that Doris had any malice toward Mattie personally; but she had a freakish love of triumphing in the discomfiture of others. Slowly she yielded to the fascination of Earle's presence. She told herself that "the detestable country" could be endurable with him to play lover at her feet. To her, mentally arraigning "the detestable country," spoke Earle: "I love this scene; fairer is hardly found in any book of nature. What is more lovely, more suggestive, than a wheat field with golden sheaves?"