The head and eyes resolutely bent upon the folio before her, the decided tone of a voice whose stern, determined accents Rhoda knew and understood full well, convinced the timid girl that appeal there was none, and that nothing remained for her but to obey. With a heavy heart she ascended the stairs to the chamber that she called her own, and which, opening into a smaller one appropriated to Kate, enabled that lighter-spirited young lady to overhear through the keyhole of the door the hardly suppressed sobs which broke from the breast of the unhappy Rhoda. “My darling, what _is_ the matter?” cried the younger girl, rushing in impetuously,--for Kate’s strong points were certainly neither prudence nor self-control,--“what is the matter, you poor dear?” And tumbling on her knees by the side of her weeping sister, Kate began sobbing too by sheer force of sympathy. A very few words sufficed to put the latter _au fait_ of the secret--_secret_, alas, no longer--which Rhoda had so long and so sedulously kept. Kate listened with eager ears and widely-distended eyes to the details, stammered forth incoherently, of this first love episode in the family. _As_ a love affair, it was certainly not without its interest; but with that interest, and in spite of her sisterly compassion, Katie certainly did feel a little surprise at the singularity of Rhoda’s choice. She made no allowance for the utter absence of competitors for her sister’s favour; all that was patent to this damsel of fast proclivities--who thought Sunday-schools a bore, and who hoped some day to be wooed by a lover of a widely different type--was the fact that Mr. Wallingford had straight hair, was anything but “jolly,” had the misfortune to possess scanty whiskers, did not smoke, and, to sum up all his defects in one comprehensive word, was a “parson.” “I can’t the least understand how Rhoda can _care_ for him,” she said an hour afterwards to her eldest brother, to whom she had just narrated the provoking circumstance that her sister, who was in love with that stupid Mr. Wallingford, had cried so long and so bitterly that she wasn’t fit to be seen,--“a man who is always talking ‘good,’ and who, of course, thinks it’s wicked to be jolly. Can you make it out, Arthur? I suppose it was all done by staring at each other, for _I_ never saw them speaking, or seeming as if anything was going on.” “Of course you didn’t,” her brother said, as he settled his cravat in the pier-glass over the mantelshelf (he was going to ride--his usual morning avocation--with Honor Beacham, and naturally wished to look his best on the occasion),--“of course you didn’t. Girls when they are in love (and the best girls too) will deceive even other women,--a very different affair, I can tell you, from taking in a man; and if you think, my dear Katie--”