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 had entire confidence in him. And, by-the-way," she added, turning to Betsy, and raising her voice to its highest pitch, "I always thought that Alfred had rather a leaning to you, Betsy."

This speech threw Betsy into such an unwonted tremor and flutter that she blushed violently, and looked guilty of a hundred tender passages.

The moment their visitor had departed, Mrs. Pratt beckoned her daughter to her side on the sofa and asked, in her penetrating voice, "Did he ever say anything, Betsy?"

I fancy that Betsy, at the moment, would have given half her life's purchase to say "Yes"; but something within her which no limitations could stunt, a perfectly well developed New England conscience, compelled her to answer:

"No, Mother, he never said a word."

So the stigma of the unsought rested upon poor Betsy, and her last chance was lost of rising in her mother's esteem.

Before she was forty her mother put her into caps, which she never changed the fashion of. They were flat on top and very bunchy at the sides, with purple or green ribbons, which bobbed up and down when she moved her head. She got a habit of letting her head "joggle" a little as she bent over her worsted-work or tatting, much to the disgust of her mother, who tried to break her of it. But her mother's admonitions used to frighten her so that she lost control of herself in that peremptory little woman's presence,