--"DUKE OF GUISE."

I must now go back to an hour or two before Mary and her friends
parted for the night. It might be about eight o'clock that evening,
and the three Miss Carsons were sitting in their father's
drawing-room. He was asleep in the dining-room, in his own
comfortable chair. Mrs. Carson was (as was usual with her, when no
particular excitement was going on) very poorly, and sitting
upstairs in her dressing-room, indulging in the luxury of a
headache. She was not well, certainly. "Wind in the head," the
servants called it. But it was but the natural consequence of the
state of mental and bodily idleness in which she was placed.
Without education enough to value the resources of wealth and
leisure, she was so circumstanced as to command both. It would have
done her more good than all the ether and sal-volatile she was daily
in the habit of swallowing, if she might have taken the work of one
of her own housemaids for a week; made beds, rubbed tables, shaken
carpets, and gone out into the fresh morning air, without all the
paraphernalia of shawl, cloak, boa, fur boots, bonnet, and veil, in
which she was equipped before setting out for an "airing," in the
closely shut-up carriage.

So the three girls were by themselves in the comfortable, elegant,
well-lighted drawing-room; and, like many similarly situated young
ladies, they did not exactly know what to do to while away the time
until the tea-hour. The elder two had been at a dancing-party the
night before, and were listless and sleepy in consequence. One
tried to read "Emerson's Essays," and fell asleep in the attempt;
the other was turning over a parcel of new songs, in order to select
what she liked. Amy, the youngest, was copying some manuscript