“To pack the toys?” said Dora. Her face grew blank, then flashed with a sudden light, then grew quite white and still again, with a gasp of astonishment and recognition. “Oh!” she cried, and something of disappointment was in her tone, “was it--was it _she_ that sent them?” In the commotion of her feelings a sudden deep red followed the paleness. Dora was all fancy, changeableness, fastidiousness, imagination, as was natural to her age. Why was she disappointed to know that her yearly presents coming out of the unseen, the fairy gifts that testified to some love unknown, came from so legitimate a source, from her mother’s sister, her own nearest relation--the lady of the other day? I cannot tell how it was, nor could she, nor any one, but it was so; and she felt this visionary, absurd disappointment go to the bottom of her heart. “Oh,” she repeated, growing blank again, with a sort of opaque shadow closing over the brightness of her eyes and clouding her face, “so that was where my boxes came from? And you helped to pack the toys? I ought to have known,” said Dora, very sedately, feeling as if she had suddenly fallen from a great height. “Yes,” said Miss Bethune, “we ought to have thought of that at once. Who else could have followed with such a faithful imagination, Dora? Who could have remembered your age, and the kind of things you want, and how you would grow, but a kind woman like that, with all the feelings of a mother? Oh, we should have thought of it before.” Dora at first made no reply. Her face, generally so changeable and full of expression, settled down more and more into opaqueness and a blank rigidity. She was deeply disappointed, though why she could not have told--nor what dream of a fairy patroness, an exalted friend, entirely belonging to the realms of fancy, she had conceived in her childish imagination as the giver of these gifts. At all events, the fact was so. Mrs. Bristow, with her heavy crape veil, ready to fall at any moment over her face, with the worn lines of her countenance, the flush and heat of emotion, her tears and repetitions, was a disappointing image to come between her and the vision of a tender friend, too delicate, too ethereal a figure for any commonplace embodiment which had been a kind of tutelary genius in Dora’s dreams all her life. Any one in actual flesh and blood would have been a shock after that long-cherished, visionary dream. And young Gordon’s laughing talk of the preparation of the box, and of his own suggestions as to its contents, and the picture he conjured up of a mystery which was half mischievous, and in which there was not only a desire to please but to puzzle the distant recipient of all these treasures, both offended and shocked the girl in the fantastic delicacy of her thoughts.