Sisters are frequently the very antithesis of each other, and so it was with the daughters of the late Mr. Charles Maynard. Olive, the youngest, the quiet, white-haired widow, who sat at work in a retired nook, was as gentle and loving by nature as Celia was hard and proud. She looked years older than Mrs. Belassis, for her hair was like silver, and the small thin face was seamed with tiny wrinkles. Only the skin retained some of its old softness and bloom, and the expression worn by the patient, peaceful face was one of childlike trust and tenderness. Maud often told her aunt Olive that she was ‘the loveliest old lady in the world,’ which, if not strictly true, did not convey an impression altogether wrong, for the little widow was beautiful in many eyes besides those of her niece. The two daughters of Mrs. Belassis were engaged, in their favourite occupation of novel-reading, which did not prevent them from talking as much as they read. Matilda was fair, fat, and somewhat puffylooking. She laboured under the delusion that she was a beauty, which was strange, because she was possessed of a figure which certainly had no great beauty, whilst her features were heavy and badly made, though not exactly ugly, and her whole appearance was, what her sister summed up in the expressive word, ‘sloppy.’ She also believed her manners to be fascinating and her conversation enlivening; but there seemed no particular ground for this article of belief. Bertha was a brunette, and possessed of much more activity and vivacity than her sister. She would have been ‘fast,’ had her mother permitted it, or had she understood how to make herself so. As matters stood, she contented herself with an assumption of high-spirited audacity which she took for wit, but which Maud, with cousinly candour, often pronounced to be simple rudeness. She was possessed of a pair of keen restless dark eyes, marked, irregular features, and a very sharp, sarcastic tongue. Her forehead was concealed by a mass of tiny dark curls, and the sallowness of her skin gave something almost foreign to her appearance. She did not set up for a beauty like Matilda, but she did believe very firmly in her own cleverness. Maud Debenham was in pleasing contrast to her two cousins. She had a small, oval face, delicately formed features, and a pair of dark violet-blue eyes with long black lashes. Her hair, which was very plentiful, was of a soft dusky brown, without any gloss—wavy, wayward hair, which never looked altogether neat and tidy, but with which it would nevertheless be hard to find fault, unless, like Mrs. Belassis, one were very orderly and trim. Without being a beauty, Maud was a bright, sweet-faced, unaffected English girl, with plenty of spirit and a decided will of her own, and yet a happy facility of disposition which had enabled her to bear cheerfully an uncongenial yoke of dependence, and to retain her gay spirits in adverse circumstances.