With the assembling of our friends in the Hall on that Christmas afternoon our story enters upon a new phase,—one, too, in which Mary Rolfe will figure more prominently than she has hitherto done. Of her friend Alice—Alice with the merry-glancing hazel eyes—the reader has, I trust, a tolerably clear conception. The picture we have of her is a pleasant one, I think,—a picture drawn not by me, but by herself. But from Mary—shy, reserved, and shrinking as she is—we can expect no such boon. Her portrait must be my work. And first, I must repeat that she was Alice’s closest friend. When their acquaintance began, it would be hard to say. Their mothers before them were warm friends, and had been so fortunate as to have their homes, after marriage, separated only by one of Richmond’s peaceful streets; so that, even in long clothes, Alice and Mary, introduced by their respective nurses, had contracted such intimacy as might be gained by a reciprocal fumbling of each other’s noses and the poking of pink fingers into blinking eyes. Across this street, a few years later, these little crafts had made voyages innumerable; beneath its branching trees trundled their unsteady hoops, and along its not very crowded sidewalk had swung proudly, hand in hand, one bright October day, going to their first school. And ever since that day they have been going, so to speak, hand in hand. One circumstance, no doubt, that contributed much to binding their hearts together, was the fact that they were only daughters; so that each was, as it were the adopted sister of the other. But what, above all things, as I have suggested elsewhere, rendered a warm friendship between them both possible and lasting, was the singularly sharp contrasts presented by their characters. Two girls more radically unlike in disposition it would be hardly possible to find.