'Well, to be sure!' she exclaimed, 'when me and Lois have been working
at them books all the morning.'

'They were all nohow--as I don't like them,' said Dolores.

'Oh, very well, please yourself then, miss, if that's all the thanks
you have in your pocket, you may put them up your own way, for all I
care. Only my lady will have the young ladies' rooms kept neat and
orderly, or they lose marks for it.'

'I don't want any help,' said Dolores, crossly, and Mrs. Halfpenny shut
the door with a bang. 'The menials are insulting me,' said Dolores to
herself, and a tear came to her eye, while all the time there was a
certain mournful satisfaction in being so entirely the heroine of a
book.

She went to work upon her books, at first hotly and sharply, and very
carefully putting the tallest in the centre so as to form a gradual
ascent with the tops and not for the world letting a second volume
stand before its elder brother, but she soon got tired, took to peeping
at one or two parting gifts which she had not yet been able to read,
and at last got quite absorbed in the sorrows of a certain Clare, whose
golden hair was cut short by her wicked aunt, because it outshone her
cousin's sandy locks. There was reason to think that a tress of this
same golden hair would lead to her recognition by some grandfather of
unknown magnificence, as exactly like that of his long-lost Claribel,
and this might result in her assuming splendours that would annihilate
the aunt. Things seemed tending to a fracture of the ice under the
cruellest cousin of all, and her rescue by Clare, when they would be