It was a rainy afternoon when Cara reached the Square. It had been settled, against Miss Cherry’s will, that she was to go alone. The girl, who was often ‘queer,’ especially when anything connected with her natural home, her father’s house, was in question, had requested that it should be so--and Miss Charity approved, to whose final decision everything was submitted at Sunninghill. ‘Don’t interfere with her,’ Miss Charity had said; ‘she is like her mother. She has a vein of caprice in her. You never could argue (if you remember) with poor Annie. You had either to give in to her, or to say no once for all, and stick to it. Carry is not like her mother all through--there are gleams of the Beresford in her. But there is a vein of caprice, and I wouldn’t cross her, just at this crisis of her life.’ ‘But I don’t see why it should be such a crisis. It is a change of scene, to be sure, and leaving us ought to be a trial,’ said Miss Cherry, dubiously. The feeling within herself was, that she would have been glad had she been more sure that this was a trial. Girls were ungrateful in their lightheartedness, and sometimes loved the risks of independence. ‘It is not as if she were going among strangers,’ said Miss Cherry. ‘She is going to her home, and to her father.’ ‘A father whom she has never known since she was a child--a house that has never lost the shadow of that dying!’ ‘Then why must not I go with her?’ said Miss Cherry. The old lady shrugged her shoulders, but said no more. And Cara got her way. As she was to go alone, she was packed, with all her belongings, into the carriage; nurse going with her, who was to help in the housekeeping, and take care of the young mistress of the old familiar house. The railway, it is true, would have carried them there in half the time; but Cara liked the preparation of the long, silent drive, and it pleased the elder ladies that their darling should make her solitary journey so to her father’s house. The road led through beautiful royal parks, more than one, and by glimpses of the pleasant river. It was like an old-fashioned expedition made in the days before railways, with full time for all the anticipations, all the dreams, of what was to come. Though her mind was full of natural excitement and sadness, Cara could not help feeling herself like one of the heroines of Miss Austen’s novels as she drove along. She had plenty of grave matters to think about, and was very much in earnest as to her life generally; yet, with the unconscious doubleness of youth, she could not help feeling only half herself, and half Elizabeth Bennet or Catherine Moreland going off into the world. And, indeed, without sharing the difficulties of these young ladies, Cara Beresford in her own person had no small problem before her. To fill the place of her mother, an accomplished woman, she who was only a girl; to make his home pleasant to her father; to set agoing once more something like family life. And she only seventeen, and