Annie Grahame was a few months younger than Caroline Hamilton (who was nearly thirteen,) but from having been emancipated from the nursery and school-room at a very early age, and made her mother's companion and confidant in all her home vexations--very pretty and engaging--she was very much noticed, and her visits to her titled relations in London, by causing her to imitate their fashionable manners, terms of speech, thoughts on dress, and rank, &c., made her a woman many years before her time; and though to Lady Helen's family and to Lady Helen herself this made her still more agreeable, from becoming so very companionable; to Mrs. Hamilton, and to all, in fact, who loved childhood for childhood's sake, it was a source of real regret, as banishing all the freshness and artlessness and warmth which ought to have been the characteristics of her age. Her father was the only one of her own family who did not admire--and so tried to check--this assumption of fine ladyism, on the part of his daughter; but it was not likely he could succeed, and he only estranged from him the affections of his child. Annie Grahame had a great many fashionable acquaintances in London, but she still regarded Caroline Hamilton as her favorite friend. Why, she could not exactly tell, except that it was so very, very delightful to have some one in the country to whom she could dilate on all the pleasures of London, display her new dresses, new music, drawings, work, &c. (not however considering it at all necessary to mention that her work and drawings were only _half_ her own, and Caroline was much too truthful herself to imagine it, and her mother too anxious to retain that guileless simplicity to enlighten her, as she was well capable of doing). Annie's quick eye discovered that at such times Caroline certainly envied her, and she imagined she must be a person of infinite consequence to excite such a feeling, and this was such a pleasant sensation, that she sought Caroline as much as possible during their stay at Moorlands. Of Mrs. Hamilton, indeed, she stood in such uncomfortable awe, though that lady never addressed her except in kindness, that as she grew older, it actually became dislike; but this only increased her intimacy with Caroline, whom she had determined should be as unlike her mother as possible; and as this friendship was the only one of his daughter's sentiments which gave Mr. Grahame unmixed satisfaction, he encouraged it by bringing them together as often as he could.