Everything pertaining to her mother was guarded by Reinette with great fidelity, and in the box where her favorite treasures were hidden away was a long, bright tress of hair and a few faded flowers, tied together with a bit of blue ribbon, to which was attached a piece of paper, with the words, “My mother’s hair, cut from her head after she was dead, and some of the flowers she held in her hands when she lay in her coffin.” Among Reinette’s books there was also an old copy of “The Lady of the Lake,” on the fly-leaf of which was written in a very pretty hand. “Margaret, From her sister Mary. Christmas, 18—.” This was the only link between herself and her mother’s family which Reinette possessed, and she built upon it a multitude of theories with regard to the Aunt Mary whom she meant some time to find, and whom she always saw clad in velvet, jewels, and old laces, with possibly a coronet on her brow. Such were Reinette’s ideas of her mother’s friends, which her father had suffered her to cherish, only smiling faintly at some of her extravagant speculations, but never contradicting them. And now, in place of lords, and ladies, and English nobility, to have _these people_ thrust upon her, this grandmother, and aunt, and cousin, with unmistakable marks of vulgarity stamped upon them, was too much, and for a time the proud, sensitive girl rebelled against it with all the fierceness of her nature, while, mingled with her bitter humiliation was a better and deeper feeling, which hurt her far more than the mortification of knowing that she was not what she had believed herself to be. Her father, whom she had so loved, and honored, and believed in, had not dealt fairly with her. Why had he not told her the truth, especially after he knew they were coming to America, and that she must certainly know it some time? “If he had told me, if he had said a kind word of them, I should have been prepared for it, and loved them, just because they were mother’s people. Oh, father, whatever your motive may have been, you did me a grievous wrong,” she said, and into her eyes there crept a look of resentment toward the father who had kept this secret from her. Then, as her thoughts went backward to the state-room where he died, and the words he said to her, she cried out: