She took all her appointed work as a matter of course. Strong, young, and healthy, she scarcely knew what fatigue was. She was cheerful, obliging, and good tempered, as thoroughly healthy people generally are. There was, to be sure, a little deposit of gunpowder in Nabby's nature, and anybody who chose to touch a match to her self-esteem, her sense of personal dignity or independence, was likely to see a pretty lively display of fireworks; but it was always soon over, and the person making the experiment did not generally care to repeat it. But Hiel Jones found this chemical experiment irresistibly fascinating, and apparently did not care how often he burned his fingers with it. Hiel was somewhat _blasé_ with easy conquests. The female sex have had in all ages their spoiled favorites, who are ungrateful just in proportion to the favors bestowed upon them; and Hiel was in his circle as much courted and pursued with flattering attentions as any spoiled tenor of the modern opera. For him did Lucinda and Jane bake surreptitious mountains of sponge cake. Small tributes of cream, butter, pies of various name and model, awaited him at different stopping-places, and were handed him by fair hands with flattering smiles. The Almira of whom Nabby discoursed with such energetic vehemence had knit Hiel a tippet, worked his name on a pocket-handkerchief with her hair, and even gone so far as to present him with one of the long yellow curls which Nabby was pleased to call "stringy." Nabby's curls certainly could not have merited any such epithet, as every separate one of them had a will and a way of its own, and all were to the full as mutinous as their mistress. Yet Hiel would have given more for one of those rebellious curls than for all Almira's smooth-brushed locks, and although a kiss from Nabby was like a kiss from one on an electric stool, snapping and prickling at every touch, yet somehow the perverse Hiel liked the excitement of the shock. Hiel's tactics for the subjugation of a female heart were in the spirit of a poet he never heard of: "Pique her, and soothe in turns; Soon passion crowns thy hopes." He instituted a series of regular quarrels with Nabby, varied by flattering attentions, and delighted to provoke her to anger, sure that she would say a vast deal more than she meant, and then, in the reaction which is always sure to follow in the case of hot-tempered, generous people, he should find his advantage. So, when the stars looked out blinking and winking through a steel-blue sky, Nabby, in the fascinating new bonnet, was handed into the smart new sleigh, tucked in with Hiel under a profusion of buffalo robes, and went jingling away. A supper and a dance awaited them at a village tavern ten miles off, and other sleighs and other swains with their ladies were on the same way, where we take our leave of them to follow our little Dolly into the parlors of the _haute noblesse_. CHAPTER XII. DOLLY GOES INTO COMPANY.