Regularly each week she went to Springfield, to take music lessons, she said, and lest something should occur making it necessary for her to stay all night, Aunt Peggy usually accompanied her to the depot, always carrying a well-filled satchel, and frequently a large bundle, whose many wrappings of paper told no tales, and were supposed by the credulous to cover the dressing-gown, which Adelaide deemed necessary to the making of her morning toilet. “It was very annoying,” she said, “to carry so much luggage, but the friends with whom she stopped were so particular that she felt obliged to change her dress, even though she merely stayed to dinner.” And so the villagers, looking at the roll of music she invariably carried in her hands, believed the tale, though a few of the nearest neighbors wondered when the young lady practiced, for it was not often that they heard the sound of the old-fashioned instrument which occupied a corner of the sitting-room. Finally, however, they decided that it must be at night, for a light was always seen in Mrs. Huntington’s windows until after the clock struck twelve. As weeks went by, most of those whom Adelaide considered _somebodies_, called, and among them Mr. Howland. By the merest chance she learned that he was coming and though she pretended that she was surprised to see him, and said she was just going out, she was most becomingly dressed in her nicely-fitting merino, which, in the evening, did not show the wear of four years. The little sitting-room, too, with its furniture so arranged as to make the best of everything, seemed homelike and cheerful, causing Mr. Howland to feel very much at ease, and also very much pleased with the dark-eyed girl he had come to see. She was very agreeable, he thought, much more so in fact than any one he had met in Oakland, and at a late hour, for one of his early habits, he bade her good night, promising to call again soon, and hear the new song she was going to learn the next time she went to Springfield. In dignified silence his sister awaited his return, and when to her greeting, “Where have you been?” he replied, “Been to call on Miss Adelaide,” the depth of the three winkles between her eyebrows was perceptibly increased, while a contemptuous Pshaw! escaped her lips. Miss Elinor was not easily deceived. From the first she had insisted that Adelaide “was putting on airs,” and if there was one thing more than another which that straightforward, matter-of-fact lady disliked, it was pretention. She had not yet been to see Mrs. Huntington, and now, when her brother, after dwelling at length upon the pleasant evening he had spent, urged her to make the lady’s acquaintance, she replied rather sharply, that she always wished to know something of the people with whom she associated. For her part, she didn’t like Miss Adelaide, and if her brother had the least regard for her feelings, he wouldn’t call there quite as often as he did.