Hetty kissed her mother, with soft arms round her neck. “We must just do the best we can, mamma,” Twelve-years-old said, “and don’t you notice nothing turns out so bad as it seems?” added the little philosopher. Hetty, like her mother before her, had a wholesome love of change, and a persistent hope in the unknown. And on the whole, barring their little breakings down, they all appeared with quite cheerful faces in their new place; and life turned out always to be livable wherever they went. The spectacle of their existence was a much more wonderful one to spectators than to themselves; for the lookers-on did not know the alleviations, the dear love among them, which was always sweet, the play of the children, which was never kept under by any misfortune, the household jests and pleasantries. They got a joke even out of the visits of the butcher and baker, those awful demands which it was so difficult to meet, and called the taxman Mr. Lillyvick, and made fun of the coal-merchant. And then, somehow or other, the kind heavens only knew how, everybody was paid in the long run, and life was never unsweet. And now Hetty was sixteen. She was growing out of the lankness of early girlhood into a pretty creature--pretty with youth, and sweetness, and self-unconsciousness, and that exquisite purity of innocence which does not know what evil is. I am not aware that she had a single feature worth any one’s notice. Her eyes were as clear as two little stars, but so are most eyes at sixteen. She was not what her mother had been, but rather what all good mothers would wish their children to be: something a little more than her mother, mounted upon the stepping-stone of Mary’s cheerful troubled existence to the next grade, with something in her Mary had not, perhaps got from her father, perhaps, what I think most likely, straight out of heaven. Mary had not been at all afraid of life, out of sweet ignorance and want of thought; but Hetty knew it, and was not afraid. She had her dreams, like every creature of her age, her thoughts of what she would do and be when her hour came; but they never involved the winning of anything, save perhaps rest and comfort for those she loved. To Hetty life was a very serious thing. She knew nothing at all of its pleasures,--probably the defect in her, if she had a defect (and she must have had, for everybody has), was that she despised these pleasures. When she read in her story-books of girls whose dreams were of balls and triumphs, and who were angry with fate and the world when they did not obtain their share of these delights, Hetty would throw back her head with disdain. “I am sure girls are not like that,” she would say. “Oh yes, Hetty, girls are like that!” Mary would reply. “I remember crying my eyes out because Anna and Sophie went to the hunt ball without me.”