“You’re not a bit encouraging; no one is!” Rose said helplessly, leaning back in her chair; “it makes my heart ache to think of wasting poor father’s money so!” “And I reckon he’d give the whole of it to keep your little finger from hurting; he thinks you’re a chip of the moon. And how in the world do you know you’ve wasted it yet?” continued her cousin, calmly indignant; “perhaps you didn’t sing well to-day; is that any reason you won’t to-morrow?” Rose looked at the angular figure opposite, and the color came again slowly to her cheeks and the light to her eyes. “I’m so glad you came, Cousin Emily!” she exclaimed; “without you I should have just given up, they looked so--so indifferent, those men with their eye-glasses and their notebooks and their stare.” “Stare? I should think so!” replied Miss Carter severely; “I’ll put a Frenchman against anything for staring. I believe myself that Paris is a Sodom and Gomorrah boiled into one, let me tell you! How any nice sweet girl can marry one of them-- Rose, if anything should ever induce me at any time to think of marrying one, clap me into an insane asylum, you hear?” And Rose, burying her face in her hands, laughed until she cried. But without Miss Carter and Aunt Hannah her courage would have failed her often in the months which followed. She was put back at the alphabet of music and worked with the beginners. More than one night she secretly cried herself to sleep without daring to tell Cousin Emily of her weakness. Homesickness, too, pinched her and took the color from her cheeks, but she worked bravely on. She had reached Paris in June and she had failed at her trial in September. The months which followed were crowded to the brim, and she tried to shut her heart and her ears to news from home, except that which concerned her father. The judge’s letters were purposely cheerful and optimistic, he said so little about financial difficulties that it seemed like a troubled dream to Rose; she never quite realized all it meant to her future.