Without being handsome, Queenie was woman enough to know that her clear brown complexion, white teeth, and brown velvety eyes would win a certain amount of commendation. Queenie's eyes, as she well knew, were her strong point--they were of singular depth and expression. Some one once remarked that they reminded him of brown wells, for they had no bottom. Somebody was right; but they were not mild eyes for all that. But we must tell how Queenie Marriott became a teacher at Miss Titheridge's, in the select establishment for young ladies at Granite Lodge, where her little sister Emmie was a sort of foundation scholar, or demi-semi-boarder, as one witty young lady described her, with reference to the somewhat scanty scholastic privileges eked out by Miss Titheridge in return for unmitigated drudgery on Queenie's part, and a trifling stipend paid out of Queenie's poor little purse; the contents of which barely sufficed to find them in decent clothing. Her own and part of Emmie's board were all the wages Queenie received for her endurance and patient labor; and half of the miserable little pittance of forty pounds a year, left to her by her mother, was paid quarterly into Miss Titheridge's hand, invariably received by Miss Titheridge in the same stony manner, and acknowledged in the same words:--"I hope you and Emily will always be grateful to us, Miss Marriott, for the handsome and gratuitous manner in which my poor sister and myself have befriended you" (the second Miss Titheridge had been dead fifteen years, but it was Miss Titheridge's way always to associate the deceased as though she were still the partner of her labors). "There would have been very few in this mercenary world who would have acted as generously, but, as Caroline always beautifully puts it, we do it 'not to be seen of men.'" After which speech it was odd that the visitors to Granite Lodge, when they were ushered into the school-room, always gazed curiously at the young teacher, and then at a certain closely-cropped head in the darkest corner, and went out whispering to themselves of Miss Titheridge's Christianity and magnanimity of soul. In more than one case the story turned the scale in the mind of a dubious parent, who after such a recital could not but trust their darlings under the care of so good a creature as Miss Titheridge. "My dear, she actually supports those two poor orphans; she assured me that a few pounds are all she receives, and that is pressed upon her. Can you conceive such generosity?" went on one warm-hearted visitor, the mother of seven female hopes, at least to Miss Titheridge; "a poor hard-working school-mistress, and treats them as though they were her own daughters."