another girl that might turn out to be a possible rival.

“That’s right, my dear,” said Miss Pimpernell; “I’m glad, Seraphine, to hear you take the part of the absent; Miss Clyde ought to be here now—she promised me to come soon after luncheon.”

Even as the good old soul spoke, I heard the outer door of the school-room open, and a light footstep along the passage. “There she is now, I do believe!” whispered Miss Pimpernell to me.

I could scarcely breathe. I felt that I had at last arrived at the crisis of my life. It must be her, I thought, for my heart palpitated with wild pulsations.

And, as the thought thrilled through me, my lost madonna entered the room.

I was not one whit surprised. I had been certain that I should see her again!

Chapter Four.

“Hope.”

CONTENTS

 “The wit, the vivid energy of sense, The truth of nature, which, with Attic point, And kind, well-temper’d satire, smoothly keen, Steals through the soul, and without pain corrects.” 

Yes, she it was of whom I had thought and dreamt, and built airy castles on imaginative foundations—châteaux en Espagne—that had almost crumbled into vacancy during those long and weary weeks, and monotonous months, of waiting, and watching, and longing!

She entered; and the dull, disordered school-room, with its leaf-strewn floor all covered with broken branches and naked boughs of chopped-up evergreens, its mass of piled forms, its lumbering desks and hassocks, its broken windows, its down-hanging maps of colossal continents, seemed changed all at once, in a moment, as if by the touch of some magic wand, into an enchanted palace.

The fairy princess had at last appeared, the sleeping beauty been awakened; and all was altered.

The semi-transparent sprig of mistletoe, which Seraphine Dasher had mischievously suspended over the doorway, looked like a chaplet of pearls; the pointed stems of yew became frosted in silver; the variegated holly was 

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