It was true she was; but one figure flitted more than all the
rest through her visions. He presented flower after flower to her
in that baseless morning dream, which was all too quickly ended.
The night before she had seen her dead mother in her sleep, and
she wakened weeping. And now she dreamed of Mr. Bellingham, and
smiled.

And yet, was this a more evil dream than the other?

The realities of life seemed to cut more sharply against her
heart than usual that morning. The late hours of the preceding
nights, and perhaps the excitement of the evening before, had
indisposed her to bear calmly the rubs and crosses which beset
all Mrs. Mason's young ladies at times.

For Mrs. Mason, though the first dressmaker in the county, was
human after all; and suffered, like her apprentices, from the
same causes that affected them. This morning she was disposed to
find fault with everything, and everybody. She seemed to have
risen with the determination of putting the world and all that it
contained (her world, at least) to rights before night; and
abuses and negligences, which had long passed unreproved, or
winked at, were to-day to be dragged to light, and sharply
reprimanded. Nothing less than perfection would satisfy Mrs.
Mason at such times.

She had her ideas of justice, too; but they were not divinely
beautiful and true ideas; they were something more resembling a
grocer's or tea-dealer's ideas of equal right. A little
over-indulgence last night was to be balanced by a good deal of