Hagar fell to considering it. "Is it?... But then we don't all think the same thing pretty or ugly." The red showed again like wine beneath her smooth, dark skin, "Sylvie, I'd _like_ to be beautiful. I'd like to be as beautiful as Beatrix Esmond. I'd like to be as beautiful as Helen of Troy. But everybody at Eglantine thinks I am ugly, and I suppose I am." She looked wistfully at Sylvie. Now in the back of Sylvie's head there was certainly the thought that Hagar ought to have said, "I'd like to be as beautiful as you, Sylvie." But Sylvie had a sweet temper and she was not unmagnanimous. "I shouldn't call you ugly," she said judicially. "You aren't pretty, and I don't believe any one would ever call you so, but you aren't at all disagreeably plain. You've got something that makes people ask who you are. I wouldn't worry." "Oh, I wasn't worrying!" said Hagar. "I was only _preferring_.--I'll wear the lace collar." She took it out of a black Japanned box, and with it the topaz brooch that had been her mother's. The visitor from England found the large, square Eglantine parlour an interesting room. The pier-glasses, framed in sallow gilt, the many-prismed chandelier, the old velvet carpet strewn with large soft roses, the claw-foot furniture, the two or three portraits of powdered Colonial gentlemen, the bits of old china, the framed letters bearing signatures that seemed to float to her from out her old United States History--all came to her like a vague fragrance from some unusual old garden. And then, curiously superimposed upon all this, appeared memorials of four catastrophic years. Soldiers and statesmen of the Confederacy had found no time in which to have their portraits painted. But Mrs. LeGrand had much of family piety and, in addition, daguerreotypes and _cartes de visite_ of the dead and gone. With her first glow of prosperity she had a local artist paint her father from a daguerreotype. Stalwart, with a high Roman face, he looked forth in black broadcloth with a roll of parchment in his hand. The next year she had had her husband painted in his grey brigadier's uniform. Her two brothers followed, and then a famous kinsman--all dead and gone, all slain in battle. The portraits were not masterpieces, but there they were, in the pathos of the grey, underneath each a little gilt plate. "Killed at Sharpsburg."--"Killed Leading a Charge in the Wilderness."--"Killed at Cold Harbour." Upon the wall, against the pale, century-old paper, hung crossed swords and cavalry pistols, and there were framed commissions and battle orders, and an empty shell propped open the wide white-panelled door. The English visitor found it all strange and interesting. It was as though a fragrance of dried rose-leaves contended with a whiff of gunpowder. The small dining-room into which presently she was carried had fascinating prints--"Pocahontas Baptized," and "Pocahontas Married," and a group of