We left school at the same time, but our positions were very different in the world. She belonged to a gay family, and was immediately plunged into the whirl of fashionable life, while I led a very quiet, sober existence, which was well suited to my shy nature, but formed a strong contrast to pretty Meta’s sphere of action. One might have supposed our intercourse would have been broken off; on the contrary, we remained as intimate, as when we studied the same lessons, and sat at the same desk. True, a great deal of the visiting had to depend upon Meta, as home duties necessarily kept me from her; and she seldom passed a day without peeping in upon my “little nest,” as she called our cozy library; and once in a while she would enliven an evening by drinking tea with us; thus she kept me “booked up” in all the gossip and doings of the fashionable world. She had no parents; her sister, two years her senior, and a widowed aunt, were her only near relatives. Meta and her sister were in comfortable circumstances—they had a nice little fortune apiece, which, of course, the world magnified. Their aunt had, however, quite a large life income, which, united with their own, made a very handsome appearance. Mrs. Hunsdon, the aunt, was a silly _one-ideaed_ woman. To be fashionable, was the sole aim of her existence. She had no children, and turned all her attention to the establishment in life of her nieces. She had not cleverness, nor independence enough to be a leader in the gay world, but was always found fastened on to some _distingué_ person, whose shadow she made herself—going and coming, living and breathing as near like her model as possible; poor soul! how much labor she endured for her position in society. Her eldest niece was her exact counterpart; and at the time of Meta’s _entrée_, Miss Hallowell had secured an excellent offer from a most unexceptionable person, according to their ideas of such things; and the preparations for the approaching wedding were carried on in a grand manner. The whole town rang with Miss Hallowell’s magnificent wardrobe; the beautiful gifts presented by her husband elect; and I heard no less than a dozen different accounts of what was to be her wedding-dress; each account professing to come from Miss W., the fashionable dress-maker and _modiste_ of the day. One morning Meta came dancing into the library where I had snugly seated myself for a quiet hour’s study, after having settled for the day, the affairs of my little domestic kingdom.