"I'll show it to you, Mabel. Isn't it pretty?" and Belle held up a small locket on a slight gold chain. It was a little, old-fashioned thing, heart-shaped, and made of fretted gold with a forget-me-not of turquoises in the centre. It was very pretty,--in Belle's eyes, of the most perfect beauty; but its great value lay in that it had belonged, as she told Mabel, to her own mamma when she was a girl. [Illustration: Belle Powers. p. 122.] It was one of Belle's greatest pleasures to sit upon her papa's knee and turn over with loving, reverent fingers the various articles of jewelry which had once been her mother's, and which were to be hers when she should be of a proper age to have them and take care of them. "Mamma's pretty things" were a source of great enjoyment to her; and although Belle loved dress as much as any little girl of her age, it was with no thought of decking herself in them, but simply for their own beauty and the sake of the dear one who had once worn them, that they were so prized. And now and then when her papa gave her some trifle suitable for her, she seldom wore it, so fearful would she be of losing it, or lest other harm should come to it. So now, as things were apt to come to harm in Mabel's destructive fingers, she was very much afraid of trusting the precious locket within them; and stoutly, though not crossly, refused to let her have it. Mabel begged and promised, whined and fretted; but the locket was still held beyond her reach, till at last she made a dive and had nearly snatched it from Belle's hold. But Daphne's eye was upon her, and Daphne's hand pulled her back as the old woman said,-- "Hi! dere! none ob dat, Miss Mabel. I ain't goin fur see my ole missus' tings took from my young missus, and me by to help it. I ain't goin fur stan' dat, no way," and Daphne's grasp was rougher than it need to have been as she held back the angry, struggling Mabel. The child was in a great passion: she struck wildly at the nurse, and screamed aloud, so that her mother came running to see what was the matter. "There then, never mind," said Mrs. Walton, as Mabel, released from Daphne's hold, rushed to her and complained that Belle would not let her touch her new locket,--"never mind, I will give you something pretty to look at." "I want a locket like Belle's to keep for my own," said Mabel; "and then I'll never let her see it." "Pooh! I wouldn't look at it," said Belle, forgetting all her good resolves, "if you showed it to me. I'd just squeeze my eyes tight shut, and never open them till you took it away. And I don't b'lieve the man in the locket-store has any like this." But Mabel had hardly left the room with her mother before Belle was sorry, as usual, for the anger she had shown, and said remorsefully to Daphne,--