Dot had her hair all down that night, and her nightgown on, and was sitting on the bed, with her feet curled up, while Ray stood in skirts and dressing-sack, before the glass, her braids half unfastened, stock-still, looking in at herself, or through her own image, with a most intent oblivion of what she pretended to be there for. "Well, Ray! Have you forgotten the way to the other side of your head, or are you enchanted for a hundred years? I shall want the glass to-morrow morning." Ray roused up from her abstraction. "I was thinking," she said. "Yes'm. I suppose you'll be always thinking now. You had just outgrown that trick, a little. It was the affliction of my childhood; and now it's got to begin again. 'Don't talk, Dot; I'm thinking.' Good-by." There was half a whimper in Dorothy's last word. "Dot! You silly little thing!" And Rachel came over to the bedside, and put her arms round Dorothy, all crumpled as she was into a little round white ball. "I was thinking about Marion Kent." CHAPTER XVI. RECOMPENSE. That night, Marion Kent was fifty miles off, in the great, mixed-up, manufacturing town of Loweburg. She had three platform dresses now,--the earnings of some half-dozen "evenings." The sea-green silk would not do forever, in place after place; they would call her the mermaid. She must have a quiet, elegant black one, and one the color of her hair, like that she had seen the pretty actress, Alice Craike, so bewitching in. She could deepen it with chestnut trimmings, all toning up together to one rich, bright harmony. Her hair was "_blond cendre_,"--not the red-golden of Alice Craike's; but the same subtle rule of art was available; "_cafe-au-lait_" was her shade; and the darker velvet just deepened and emphasized the effect. She was putting this dress on to-night, with some brown and golden leaves in the high, massed braids of her hair. She certainly knew how to make a picture of herself; she was just made to make a picture of. The hotel waitress who had brought up her tea on a tray, had gone down with a report that Miss Kent was "stunning;" and two or three housemaids and a number of little boys were vibrating and loitering about the hall and doorway below, watching for her to come down to her carriage. It was just as good, so far as these things went, as if she had been Mrs. Kemble, or Christine Nilsson, or anybody. And Marion, poor child, had really got no farther than "these things," yet. She reached, for herself, to just what she had been able to appreciate in others. She had taken in the housemaid and small-boy view of famousness, and she was having her shallow little day of living it. She had not found out, yet, how short a time that would last. "Verily," it was said for us all long ago, "ye shall have each your reward," such as ye look and labor for. One great boy was waiting for her, _ex officio_, and without disguise,--the President of the Lyceum Club, before which she was to read to-night.