"Poor Mury!" said Cornelia, softly. "Are you so pleased? I want you should be pleased. If I ken make someone happy to-day--right-down, tearing happy, it's going to help me more'n you know. ... Won't you enjoy going shopping with your friend, Mury, bossing round in that store, choosing the things you want, and putting on airs as if you owned the bank? Mind you put on airs, Mury! Make 'em hop round, and get things to your taste. They'll think the more of you, and it's not every day one furnishes a house. ... I'll send you my picture to stand on the mantelpiece in that parlour, and when you dust it in the mornings, you can send me a kind thought 'way over all those miles of ocean, and I'll think of you sitting in the lady's chair. ... For the land's sake, girl, don't have a fit! You don't need to have a thing unless you say so!" "Oh, Miss Cornelia!" sobbed Mary, brokenly. "You're too--I'm so--you're an _angel_, Miss Cornelia, that's what you are! ... Jim will go off his head when he hears this.--It's a sort of thing you can't seem to believe.--I loved to wait on you, miss; if you'd never given me a thing I'd have loved it all the same--you talked so kind, and took such an interest, and was always so lively and laughing. It wasn't for what I could get--but the house! ... To have a house thrown at you, as you may say, at a moment's notice--it--takes away my breath! I can't seem to take it in." "But you are happy, Mury? You feel happy to think of it?" "I should think I do just. Clean dazed with happiness!" "Poor Mury!" said Cornelia, again. She looked across the room at the flushed, ecstatic face of the prospective bride, and smiled with tender sympathy. "I'm real glad you're pleased. To-night, just as soon as dinner's over, you must go out and tell your friend. I'll fix it up with Aunt Soph. You'll have a fine time, won't you? He won't believe it's true, but you'll _make_ him believe, and be as happy as grigs walking round and planning out that parlour. Come into my room when you get back and tell me what he says. I shan't be asleep!" There seemed no time for sleep during the next few days. The mornings were devoted to packing, and to long confidential interviews with Elma; the afternoons to a succession of tea-parties, to which every old lady in Norton was bidden in turns, to say the same things, and breathe the same pious good wishes; the evenings to decorous cribbage matches with her aunt; the nights--the nights were Cornelia's own secret, but they left a wan, heavy-eyed damsel to yawn at the breakfast-table each morning.