The morning came; and by this time it was the end of June, almost midsummer weather. Mrs Atheling herself, with the most anxious care, superintended the dressing of her daughters. They were dressed with the most perfect simplicity; and nobody could have supposed, to see the result, that any such elaborate overlooking had been bestowed upon their toilette. They were dressed well, in so far that their simple habiliments made no pretension above the plain pretty inexpensive reality. They were not intensely fashionable, like Mrs Tavistock’s niece, who was a regular Islingtonian “swell” (if that most felicitous of epithets can be applied to anything feminine), and reminded everybody who saw her of work-rooms and dressmakers and plates of the fashions. Agnes and Marian, a hundred times plainer, were just so many times the better dressed. They were not quite skilled in the art of gloves--a difficult branch of costume, grievously embarrassing to those good girls, who had not much above a pair in three months, and were constrained to select thrifty colours; but otherwise Mrs Atheling herself was content with their appearance as they passed along Bellevue, brightening the sunny quiet road with their light figures and their bright eyes. They had a little awe upon them--that little shade of sweet embarrassment and expectation which gives one of its greatest charms to youth. They were talking over what they were to say, and marvelling how Mr Burlington would receive them; their young footsteps chiming as lightly as any music to her tender ear--their young voices sweeter than the singing of the birds, their bright looks more pleasant than the sunshine--it is not to be wondered at if the little street looked somewhat dim and shady to Mrs Atheling when these two young figures had passed out of it, and the mother stood alone at the window, looking at nothing better than the low brick-walls and closed doors of Laurel House and Green View.