Then she talked of Roy, and asked Georgie to bring him there some day; and Georgie promised that she would, without meaning at all what she said. She was very morbid upon the subject of an interview between Annie and her lover, so long as he was her lover. Once his wife, she should not care so much, she thought; and she was really in earnest in thinking that Annie should spend a portion of the time with her. Roy knew there was such a child; that in some way she was connected with the family, and that she called Georgie her sister; but he had never evinced any special interest in her, and Georgie did not mean that he should until she chose to have him. So when Annie asked if she might go over to New York at once, and spend a few days at Mrs. Burton’s, Georgie hesitated, and calculated the chances of Roy’s coming to see her, deciding finally that she was safe, and promising Annie that she should go if Jack was willing. He was willing, and was more friendly and cordial with Georgie than he had been before since her engagement. He always liked her best when she was interested in Annie, and he assented readily to the visit; and Georgie appointed the next day to come for the little girl. But one of the sinking turns to which the child was subject came on to prevent the visit, which was deferred until December, when it at last occurred; and Annie had been a week with Georgie, and was intending to stop a few days longer, when Roy suddenly made his appearance, and the visit was at an end. Georgie could scarcely define to herself why she dreaded so much to have Roy see her sister; and when she received his card, and knew he was waiting for her in the parlor below, her first impulse was to bring him up at once to her room, and have the interview over; but with that impulse there came a feeling that she could not stand by Roy and see him talking so kindly to Annie as he would, without suffering such pangs of remorse and anguish as she was not willing voluntarily to incur. And so she merely said to him, when he remarked that she looked pale and tired, “I am a little worn, I guess. I have had Annie, my adopted sister, you know, here for a week or more, and, as she is a great invalid, it has kept me closer in my room than was altogether for my health. How is your mother? And are you comfortable at the Worth House? Though of course you are. I went through the rooms the other day, and almost envied you. Such elegance, with so much of home-comfort, is not to be found elsewhere in New York, or, one may almost say, in the world,—such a gentlemanly host as the man in charge, and then the proprietor himself. I went down into the bookstore, to get some note-paper I did not want, for the sake of seeing him. One of his authors has styled him the ‘Royal George,’ and he is fully entitled to the name. I wish I knew him intimately. I must manage it somehow, if I have to write a book.”