"It is just like a pink rose," she said to herself, her eyes wandering from the walls, delicately tinted a soft rose colour, to the sofa and chairs upholstered in a deeper shade of the same colour, and the carpet, whose darker tint of rose harmonised with the paler hues. Every table seemed to the girl to overflow with books and magazines; bowls of flowers, vases of flowers, pots of flowers, stood on every available shelf, and in every possible corner. The windows were draped with rose-coloured silk curtains, that made even the grey sky beyond them look less grey, and the pictures on the walls drew a gasp of delight from Christina's lips. They were mainly landscapes, and in almost every case they represented wide spaces, open tracts of country, that gave one a sense of life and freshness. Here was an expanse of sea, blue and smiling as the sky that stooped to meet it; there, long green rollers swept up a sandy beach, whilst clouds lit up by a rift of sunshine, lay on the horizon. On this side was a moorland, purple with heather, bathed in the glory of the setting sun; on that side, a plain, far-reaching as the sea itself, soft and green and misty, bounded by mountains, whose snow-crowned summits stood out in serried stateliness against the faint blue sky. In a looking-glass hanging on the wall, Christina caught sight of her own reflection, and a shamed consciousness of her white face and shabby clothes, gave her a sense of the incongruousness between her own appearance, and the loveliness around her. But this uneasy sense of discrepancy had barely entered her mind, when the door opened, and there entered a tiny personage, whose daintiness made Christina all at once feel huge, awkward, and ungainly. "It was sweet of you to come," the little lady exclaimed, holding out to the girl a white hand flashing with diamonds, "you are the kind lady who brought my Baba home? Henry was very incoherent; he always is, in a grand, long-winded way of his own. But I gathered from his meandering remarks, that you had come in answer to my advertisement." "Yes," Christina answered; "I saw it--the advertisement--in the _Morning Post_ to-day. I thought it was so kind of you to advertise, that I came. But, of course, when I brought the darling baby home, I only did what everybody else would have done," she added, rather breathlessly. "A lady--and very proud," the thought ran through her listener's brain; but aloud the little lady only said: "I can't put into words how grateful I am to you, all the same. You see, my little girlie is my ewe lamb--my only child--and she is very precious. If anything had happened to her, I--oh! but we mustn't talk about dreadful things that might happen, when I hope they never will. Baba was a naughty monkey to run out alone. But she is rather a sweet monkey, isn't she?"