"I shall never be able to wear it," she moaned. "Oh, how COULD she buy such a thing? And I needed a new dress so awfully, awfully much." "It isn't really so bad, Laura," pleaded Pin. "It'll look darker, I'm sure, if you've got it on--and if you don't go out in the sun." "You haven't got to wear it. It was piggish of you, Pin, perfectly piggish! You MIGHT have watched what she was buying." "I did, Laura!" asseverated Pin, on the brink of tears. "There was a nice dark brown and I said take that, you would like it better, and she said hold your tongue, and did I think she was going to dress you as if you were your own grandmother." This dress hung for weeks in the most private corner of Laura's school wardrobe. Her companions had all returned with new outfits, and on the first assemblage for church there was a great mustering of one another, both by girls and teachers. Laura was the only one to descend in the dress she had worn throughout the winter. Her heart was sore with bitterness, and when the handful of Episcopalians were marching to St Stephen's-on-the-Hill, she strove to soothe her own wound. "I can't think why my dress hasn't come," she said gratuitously, out of this hurt, with an oblique glance to see how her partner took the remark: it was the good-natured Maria Morell, who was resplendent in velvet and feathers. "I expect that stupid dressmaker couldn't get it done in time. I've waited for it all the week." "What a sell!" said Maria, but with mediocre interest; for she had cocked her eye at a harmless-looking youth, who was doing his best not to blush on passing the line of girls.--"I say, do look at that toff making eyes. Isn't he a nanny-goat." On several subsequent Sundays, Laura fingered, in an agony of indecision, the pleasing stuff of the dress, and ruefully considered its modish cut. Once, no one being present, she even took it out of the wardrobe. But the merciless spring sunshine seemed to make the purple shoot fire, to let loose a host of other colours it in as well, and, with a shudder, she re-hung it on its peg.