Uncle Jasper's red face had grown positively pathetic in its agitation. "What a place England must have become!" he interrupted with a groan. "Well, lass, I'll believe you, but I have one request to make. Tell me what you like about your wedding; go into all the raptures you care for over your wedding dress, and even over the lucky individual for whom you will wear it; tell me twenty times a day that he's perfection, that you and you alone have found the eighth wonder of the world, but for the love of heaven leave out about the books! The other will be hard to bear, but I'll endeavor to swallow it--but the books, oh! heaven preserve us--leave out about the printed books. Don't mention the unlucky magazines for which you write. Don't breathe to me the thoughts with which you fill them. Oh, if there's an awful creature under the sun 'tis a blue-stocking, and to think I should have come back from England to find such a horror in the person of my own niece!" CHAPTER II. THE POOR CHARLOTTE. While this light and playful scene was being enacted in a wealthy house in Prince's Gate, and Charlotte Harman and her father laughed merrily over the Australian uncle's horror of authors and their works, another Charlotte was going through a very different part, in a different place in the great world's centre. There could scarcely be a greater contrast than between the small and very shabby house in Kentish Town and the luxurious mansion in Kensington. The parlor of this house, for the drawing-rooms were let to lodgers, was occupied by one woman. She sat by a little shabbily covered table, writing. The whole appearance of the room was shabby: the furniture, the carpet, the dingy window panes, the tiny pretence of a fire in the grate. It was not exactly a dirty room, but it lacked all brightness and freshness. The chimney did not draw well, and now and then a great gust of smoke would come down, causing the busy writer to start and rub her smarting eyes. She was a young woman, as young as Charlotte Harman, with a slight figure and very pale face. There were possibilities of beauty in the face. But the possibilities had come to nothing; the features were too pinched, too underfed, the eyes, in themselves dark and heavily fringed, too often dimmed by tears. It was a very cold day, and sleet was beginning to fall, and the smoking chimney had a vindictive way of smoking more than ever, but the young woman wrote on rapidly, as though for bare life. Each page as she finished it, was flung on one side; some few fell on the floor, but she did not stop even to pick them up. The short winter daylight had quite faded, and she had stood up to light the gas, when the room door was pushed slightly ajar, and one of those little maids-of-all-work, so commonly seen in London, put in her untidy head. "Ef you please, 'em, Harold's been and hurt Daisy, and they is quarreling h'ever so, and I think as baby's a deal worse, 'em."