"Thank you, Mr. Graham, I prefer remaining with Cornelia," answered Beulah, who had no wish to mingle in the crowd which, she understood from the conversation, would assemble that evening in the parlors. The trio round the hearth looked at each other, and evidently thought she manifested very heathenish taste. Cornelia smiled, and leaned back with an expression of pleasure which very rarely lighted her face. "You are shockingly selfish and exacting," said Antoinette, curling her long ringlets over her pretty fingers and looking very bewitching. Her cousin eyed her in silence, and not particularly relishing her daughter's keen look Mrs. Graham rose, kissed her forehead, and said gently: "My love, the Vincents, and Thorntons. and Hendersons all sent to inquire after you this morning. Netta and I must go down now and prepare for our tableaux. I leave you in good hands. Miss Benton is considered an admirable nurse, I believe." "Mother, where is Eugene?" "I really do not know. Do you, Mr. Graham?" "He has gone to the hotel to see some of his old Heidelberg friends," answered Netta, examining Beulah's plain merino dress very minutely as she spoke. "When he comes home be good enough to tell him that I wish to see him." "Very well, my dear." Mrs. Graham left the room, followed by her husband and niece. For some time Cornelia sat just as they left her; the diamond necklace slipped down and lay a glittering heap on the carpet, and the delicate waxen hands drooped listlessly over the arms of the chair. Her profile was toward Beulah, who stood looking at the regular, beautiful features, and wondering how (with so many elements of happiness in her home) she could seem so discontented. She was thinking, too, that there was a certain amount of truth in that persecuted and ignored dictum, "A man only sees that which he brings with him the power of seeing," when Cornelia raised herself, and, turning her head to look for her companion, said slowly: "Where are you? Do you believe in the Emersonian 'law of compensation,' rigid and inevitable as fate? I say, Beulah, do you believe it?" "Yes; I believe it." "Hand me the volume there on the table. His exposition of 'the absolute balance of Give and Take, the doctrine that everything has its price,' is the grandest triumph of his genius. For an hour this sentence has been ringing in my ears: 'In the nature of the soul is the compensation for the inequalities of condition.' We are samples of the truth of this. Ah, Beulah, I have paid a heavy, heavy price! You are destitute of one, it is true, but exempt from the other. Yet, mark you, this law of 'compensation' pertains solely to earth and its denizens; the very existence and operation of the law precludes the necessity, and I may say the possibility, of that future state, designed, as theologians argue, for rewards and punishments." She watched her visitor very closely.