"That matter is already settled," said Miss Malvina, calmly. "I have turned the trunks which held poor Calista's wardrobe and other property over to Miss Druett for the use of the child. Sophronia and I looked them over, and repacked them with abundance of cedar and black pepper, and locked them up again. Of course they belong to the child; and as Miss Stanfield assumes the care and education of the orphan, she is the fit custodian of all that appertains to her in right of her deceased parent." And Miss Malvina was a little soothed, in the midst of her grief, by thinking how neatly she had turned her long sentence. "Oh!" said Mrs. John, significantly, and rising at the same time. "I am sure the child is quite welcome to all that is left of her poor mother's things. At the same time, I must say I think I might have been consulted, if only for form's sake." "You forget that you said you washed your hands of the whole concern," said Mrs. Tom. "Oh, very well. I don't grudge you anything you have made of the transaction. Good-morning." And Mrs. John sailed away, resolved to keep a sharp look-out on Mrs. Tom's "go to meeting" clothes, so as to challenge any article of Calista's wardrobe on its first appearance. She was disappointed, however. Mrs. Tom's temper was sharpened as well as her wits by hard encounters with adverse fortune, but, poor as she was, she would have scorned to enrich herself at the expense of an orphan child. As to Miss Malvina, she was so near heaven already that the richest things on earth and the poorest looked equally small in her eyes. To the little Calista, the parting with her kind old guardian and the long journey seemed like a dreary dream, from which she woke to find herself an inmate of the old Stanfield house, creeping about by herself, with no mates but the animals in the farmyard, slighted and snubbed by her aunt, treated with a sort of surly kindness by Miss Druett, her aunt's companion and confidante, and sometimes petted and sometimes scolded by the two old servants whom Miss Stanfield still retained. Sometimes it seemed to her that her present life was a dream, and that she should wake up to find herself in Miss Malvina's little bed-room, under that red-and-white coverlet wrought in gorgeous patterns of long-tailed birds pecking at berries, which she used to follow out with her little fingers. Sometimes the past grew dream-like, and she thought she must always have lived is the old house, saying lessons to Miss Druett and watching the two elderly ladies playing endless games—cribbage one evening, backgammon the next—or slipping out to the kitchen, when, if Chloe were in a good humor, she would contrive some kind of treat for the child, and tell her stories of the past glories of the family, and of her handsome father when he was a boy.