A withering glance from Lottie’s eyes silenced Miss Agatha, while Lottie’s cheeks were scarlet, and her pulse throbbed faster than its wont. She was not naturally hard and cruel, and given to wounding people unnecessarily. She professed to be a Christian; perhaps she was one. She certainly was very rigid with regard to all the fasts and holy days, and no religious devotee kept Lent, so far as churchgoing was concerned, more strictly than she did; but she had been reared and trained in the school of fashion and caste until many of her better impulses were warped and deformed, and she sometimes did things thoughtlessly, of which she repented afterward. Bearing the reputation of being exceedingly exclusive, she had no idea of inviting into her charmed circle any who wished to enter, and deemed it her duty to shut and bar the door against all intruders, especially if she felt that the intruder had some claim upon her. So, when she overheard Kitty’s complaint, and felt in her heart that not only herself but many of her sisters in the church were sadly remiss in their reception of strangers, she said what she did, in a sudden fit of impatience that any one should expect to make her acquaintance at a sewing society. But she had no idea it was Kitty Craig whom she was lashing so unmercifully, and she would have given considerable for the privilege of recalling her thoughtless words. But it was too late; the mischief was done, and Kitty was gone, and, as is frequently the case when we are conscious of having injured a person in any way, Lottie, after the first pangs of self-reproach were over, found herself with a greater aversion than ever to that “nutshell of a house” which might be “put into her parlor,” and Kitty’s chances for an acquaintance with Mrs. Amasa Steele were far less than before. “A rat among cats” she certainly was, and she felt it keenly as she walked home, with Lottie’s scornful words ringing in her ears and making her heart throb so painfully. “The sensitive ones, who feel slighted if they are not noticed.” Had it really come to this, that she was thus designated—she, who at home had been first in everything, and had herself, perhaps, been a little hard on the sensitive ones, not knowing then just how they felt. She knew now, and, once alone in her room, wept bitter tears at the first real slight she had ever received. Then, as she remembered what Lottie had said of duty, she questioned herself closely to see how far her motives in going so regularly to the sewing-rooms had been pure and such as God would approve, and she found, alas! that they would not altogether bear the test applied. Something beside a genuine desire to do good had drawn her thither; a hope that she might by chance make some pleasant acquaintance, had been strong in her heart, and she confessed it, amid a gush of tears, to the Friend who never failed her, and to whom she always took her sorrows, whether great or small.