women with children and several negroes gathered about an open grave, one woman standing out, reading the burial service.--Roger Michael was so interested that she would have liked not to talk at all, just to sit and look at the prints and mark the negro servants passing about the table. But Mrs. LeGrand's agreeable voice was asking about the health of the Queen--she bestirred herself to be an acceptable guest. The small dining-room was separated only by an archway from the large dining-room, and into the latter, in orderly files, came the Eglantine pupils, wound about to their several tables and seated themselves with demureness. M. Morel was speaking of the friendship of France and England. Roger Michael, while she appeared to listen, studied these American girls, these Southern girls. She found many of them pretty, even lovely,--not, emphatically, with the English beauty of skin, not with the colour of New England girls, among whom, recently, she had been,--not with the stronger frame that was coming in with this generation of admission to out-of-door exercise, the certain boyish alertness and poise that more and more she was seeing exhibited,--but pretty or lovely, with delicacy and a certain languor, a dim sweetness of expression, and, precious trove in America! voices that pleased. She noted exceptions to type, small, swarthy girls and large overgrown ones, girls that were manifestly robust, girls that were alert, girls that were daring, girls that were timid or stupid, or simply anæmic, girls that approached the English type and girls that were at the very antipodes--but the general impression was of Farther South than she had as yet gone in America, of more grace and slowness, manner and sweetness. Their clothes interested her; they were so much more "dressed" than they would have been in England. Evidently, in deference to the smaller room, there was to-night an added control of speech; there sounded no more than a pleasant hum, a soft, indistinguishable murmur of young voices. "They are so excited over the prospect of your speaking to them after supper," said Mrs. LeGrand, her hand upon the coffee urn.--"Cream and sugar?" "They do not seem excited," thought Roger Michael.--"Sugar, thank you; no cream. Of what shall I talk to them? In what are they especially interested?" "In your charming books, I should say," answered Mrs. LeGrand. "In how you write them, and in the authors you must know. And then your sweet English life--Stratford and Canterbury and Devonshire--" "We have been reading 'Lorna Doone' aloud this month," said Miss Carlisle. "And the girls very cleverly arranged a little play.... Sylvie here played Lorna beautifully." Roger Michael smiled across at Hagar, two or three places down, on the other side of the table. "I should like to have seen it," she said in her good, deep English voice. "Oh," said Hagar, "I'm not Sylvie. I played Lizzie."