"Yes," answered Theo; "but he died, you know." Priscilla nodded. "The week before their wedding-day," she said. "Mr. Oglethorpe told me so." Theo answered in the affirmative again. "And poor Pam could not forget him," she added, her usual tender reverence for poor Pam showing itself in her sorrowing voice. "She was very pretty then, and Lady Throckmorton was angry because she would not marry anybody else; but Pamela never cared for anybody else." Priscilla got up from her chair, and, coming to the hearth, leaned against the low mantel, pen in hand. She looked down on Theodora North with a curious expression in her cold, handsome eyes. "Is your sister like you?" she asked. Her tone was such a strange one that Theo lifted her face with a faint, startled look. "No," she replied, almost timidly. "Pamela is fairer than I am, and not so tall. We are not alike at all." "I was not thinking of that," said Priscilla. "I was wondering if you were alike in disposition. I think I was wondering most whether you would be as faithful as Pamela." "That is a strange question," Miss Elizabeth interposed. "Theodora has not been tried." But Priscilla was looking straight at Theo's downcast eyes. "But I think Theodora knows," she said, briefly. "Are you like your sister in that, Theodora? I remember hearing Mr. Oglethorpe say once you would be." Theo dropped her ivory crochet-needle, and bent to pick it up, with a blurred vision and nervous fingers. "I cannot tell," she said. "I am not old enough to know yet." "You are seventeen," said Priscilla. "I knew at seventeen." Theo recovered the needle, and reset it in her work to give herself time, and then she looked up and faced her questioner bravely, in a sort of desperateness. "If I knew that I loved any one. If I had ever loved any one as Pamela loved Mr. Brunwalde, I should be like Pamela," she said. "I should never love any one else." From that time she fancied that Priscilla Gower liked her better than she had done before; at any rate, she took more notice of her, though she was never effusive, of course. She talked to her oftener, and seemed to listen while she talked, even though she was busy at the time. She said to her once that she would like to know Pamela; and, emboldened by this, Theo ventured to bring one of Pam's letters to read to her; and when she had read it, told the whole story of her sister's generosity in a little burst of enthusiastic love and gratitude that fairly melted tender-hearted old Miss Elizabeth to tears, and caused her to confide afterward to Theo the fact that she herself had felt the influence of the tender passion, in consequence of the blandishments of a single gentleman of uncertain age, whose performances upon the flute had been the means of winning her affections, but had unhappily resulted in his contracting a fatal cold while serenading on a damp evening.