Page:George Weston--The apple-tree girl.djvu/57

 top of that to marry one of the handsomest and richest young men in the whole United States!" With something of a gasp she slipped out of bed and looked at her reflection in the mirror. "If I wasn't such a plain little thing!" she almost cried. "But—oh, dear!—perhaps the books are right after all, and a heroine's got to be beautiful."

Still, as you have seen, it wasn't for nothing that Charlotte had the old Marlin spirit and had been raised, as a body might say, right under the shadow of Micah's apple tree; and after she had appraised the hardness of her problem it gradually began to lose some of its terrors.

"Of course, anybody can do the easy sums," she thoughtfully reflected, "and, of course, somebody's got to marry him—I don't care who he is!"

So, as she dressed herself, she began to study her problem in a most delightful manner, at one moment reasoning