possibilities of happiness, and whose hopes were still alive, had been very restless, and worried her family with many vagaries. Schemes and crotchets ran, I suppose, in the noble blood which Lady Augusta had transmitted to her daughters. It showed itself in different ways in the sisters: Helena’s ways had been all intellectual, but Gussy, who was benevolent and religious, was more difficult to deal with. The melancholy seclusion, which to an English mind is the first characteristic of a convent, has little to do with the busy beehive of a modern sisterhood; and a young woman connected with such an institution has claims made upon her which are wonderfully embarrassing to a fashionable mother. Helena, in her wildest days, when she had all sorts of committees going on, could be taken to her meetings and lectures in the carriage, like a Christian, and could be sent for when these _séances_ were over; but Gussy had to trudge off on foot to all sorts of places in her long black cloak, and to visit houses in which fever, and every kind of evil, physical and moral, abounded; and was not to be shaken by any remonstrances. Indeed, the parents had been glad to compromise and consent to any amount of Associateship, so as to keep off the dreaded possibility of a determination on Gussy’s part to enter the Sisterhood for good and all. I do not think that Gussy herself ever threatened this, though she thought of it sometimes as her best alternative, if--; but there was still an if, a living and strong peradventure in her mind. Other good-natured friends, however, strongly pressed the possibility on Lady Augusta’s mind; they did all they could to persuade the anxious mother to take forcible steps in the matter, and constrain Gussy, on her obedience, to give up her objectionable charities and devotions. Fortunately Lady Augusta did not belong to that class of women who take pleasure in worrying their children for their good. She shook her head when her pretty daughter, still as pretty as in her first season, went out in her black cloak, and the hideous bonnet, which the mother would not allow to herself was “becoming,” notwithstanding its intrinsic hideousness. She moaned over the dirt, the disease, the evil smells and sights which her child was about to encounter, and about the risk of infection to which she would expose herself. “Who can tell what you may bring back with you, Gussy?--fever, or one does not know what,” Lady Augusta said, piteously. “It is so different with our poor people at home, whom we all know.” “I will shut myself up in my room, mamma; or I will go to the House, when there is anything infectious about; but I cannot give up my work,” said Gussy, filial, but determined. “Oh, work, child! what do you mean by work?” cried Lady Augusta, driven to her wits’ end. “Home is surely better than the ‘House,’ as you call it, and I am sure Ada and I find plenty to do at home. Why cannot you do as we do?”