Employers--so it seemed to poor Margaret; they were a very new class to her--were cast in a different mould. It was their duty to ask disagreeable questions and to probe unhealed wounds; it was their duty to be stiff and cross, and not at all impressed with the outward advantages which Margaret knew she possessed. It seemed very hopeless, but she felt it necessary to persevere, at least for a little while longer. The thought aroused her. She raised her head, and became suddenly conscious of the fact of hunger. She had not eaten a morsel since breakfast. No wonder, she thought, that faintness had overpowered her. So she went into her bedroom and washed away the traces of tears, that the dirty maid-of-all-work might not read her weakness, then rang the bell to order an egg or something a little more substantial than usual for her tea. The girl came in, holding out a card that had not been improved, in point of coloring, by its transit through her fingers. She informed Margaret that a lady had left it half an hour ago with a message. The message, not very lucidly delivered, was to the effect that the lady whose name appeared in minute letters on the card would, in all probability, call again in the course of the evening. Poor Margaret! she looked at the card. "Mrs. Augustus Brown." It had not a very encouraging sound, but it might mean business, and business meant provision for Laura's needs. But the thought of the impending interview had robbed her of all appetite; so, after hastily swallowing a cup of tea with a dry biscuit, she again rang the bell, had the tea-apparatus cleared away, and then sat by the window trying to read. The apparition of a yellow chariot which seemed to fill the narrow street interrupted her, and before many minutes a thundering rap at the door made her aware of the fact that the dreaded visitor was at hand. Margaret's cheek burned. For one moment she longed desperately for a refuge where she could hide her head from these intrusions, then she remembered that she had invited them, and strove to brace her nerves to endurance. When, therefore, the door was thrown open to its fullest extent by the servant, who, never having seen so grand a person in her life as Mrs. Augustus Brown, thought it necessary to give her plenty of room, Margaret was herself again--the heightened color the struggle had called forth alone testifying to her recent emotion. Mrs. Augustus Brown was a little round individual, almost as broad as she was long, decked out in flounces and laces and ribbons: it was one of the chief trials of her life that none of these things made her look important. Mrs. Augustus Brown was governess-hunting, for she possessed no less than seven small likenesses of herself, who began to be unruly, and to require, as she would have expressed it, a stricter hand over them.