Miss Fanny's face grew crimson with vexation. "You are very disagreeable sometimes, Matilda. But I don't wonder at your fearing my getting married before you, seeing that you are the oldest of the family." It was now Matilda's turn to get angry, but the mother's quiet, even voice broke in and calmed the rising storm before the oldest of the family could frame an answer. The leading question--the dresses to be worn the night of the ball--was brought up; and when the mother turned to consult her youngest daughter on some point, she found her no longer in the room. "Where is Lola?" she wondered. "Gone to the matinee, probably," yawned Fanny, composing herself for the further perusal of her novel, "and I should have gone too, if it was not too much trouble to dress so early in the day. Dear me, don't I pity Tilly, though!" "Why?" asked Mrs. Wheaton, regarding her eldest daughter. "She will have to sit up straight all day long with that bunch of hair on her head. She thinks old Toots is coming to-night, and she wouldn't for the world lose her elegant _coiffure_ and the chance of looking pretty in his eyes." Before she had finished speaking her eyes were fastened on the book again, and whatever Tilly replied about not wishing to receive a solitaire as gift from her father fell unheeded, apparently, on the fair Fanny's ears. It was a mistake about Lola's having gone to the matinee. If we follow her we shall see her ascending one of the streets in the same quarter of the city in which the paternal mansion--as the novel-writers have it--stood, though in a far less fashionable part. Indeed, there was no fashion about; for a corner-grocery, or a retail fruit-shop occasionally made its appearance among the ranks of the generally neat houses, each of which was provided with a flower-covered veranda, or a trim front yard. One of them boasted of a garden and veranda both--the former set out with well-tended flowers, the latter almost hidden under creeping roses and trailing fuchsias. Everything about the place looked prim and neat; even the China boy, who opened the door for Lola, seemed to have been infected by the spirit prevailing, and his snowy apron fairly blinked in the rays of the sun falling through the curtain of the foliage, thinned by the cold nights of the winter season.