Her father's debts were paid; her wardrobe was supplemented with the very best style of new clothes--less expensive, but more becoming, than any that Mrs. Buxton and Mrs. Buxton's sisters had worn; and by and bye when, having got over the first shock and grief of her father's death, she made her appearance in public, and began to take an interest in her new life, she found herself, to her great astonishment, a personage--if not _the_ personage--in the society around her. It must be said, and not to her discredit, I hope, that Miss Fetherstonhaugh liked being a personage very much indeed. She had grown up a sensitive little gentlewoman, full of delicate thoughts and tastes, in the midst of dull, uncultured people of sordid cares and occupations, and of uncongenial surroundings of all sorts; and the mere physical enjoyment of her changed circumstances, in which everything was orderly, and dainty, and plenteous, and "nice," was something like the enjoyment that a flower must feel when the sun shines. And the sudden discovery that certain shy conjectures about her personal appearance (which she had hardly had leisure or heart to attend to) were confirmed by the best authority--to know herself a pretty girl, and to see that society paid her homage accordingly--this was an experience that no woman born, being in possession of her faculties, could help delighting in. And having all the grateful consciousness of the value of life and its good things that nature gives to the young and healthy, unspoiled by artificial sentiment, her delight was unbounded, and consequently unconcealed. Rachel Fetherstonhaugh was, as her uncle said, "A modest, good girl, with no nonsense about her." All the same, she was proud and glad of her fair, clear-cut features, and her pensive, large, sweet eyes that were full of tender suggestions, for which no authority existed when she lifted them meekly to an admirer's face; and that figure which with all its slenderness had the curves of beauty everywhere, and those waves of ruddy auburn hair. "I am so glad I am not plain," she once said to her cousin, Mrs. Thornley (who strange to say did not repeat the remark to all her friends with disparaging comments, but responded confidentially with a sympathising kiss, and said she could quite understand it). "I have always thought that it must be the most charming thing in the world to be a really pretty woman. And now I know it." On a grey afternoon in the beginning of May this young lady was enjoying the luxury of a slow drive up and down Collins Street, shopping with her aunt. She nestled in a soft corner of a well-appointed Victoria, with a great rug of native bearskins about her knees, showing her delicate fresh face, like a well-hung picture, to the crowd of passers-by on the pavement, and yet sitting just enough above them to see into the shop-windows over their heads; and she felt--though she did not formulate the sentiment--perfectly happy and satisfied.