them!  Beulah, the eldest, was just eleven, while her sister was eighteen months younger.  The first had a staid, and yet a cheerful look; but her cheeks were blooming, her eyes bright, and her smile sweet.  Maud, the adopted one, however, had already the sunny countenance of an angel, with quite as much of the appearance of health as her sister; her face had more finesse, her looks more intelligence, her playfulness more feeling, her smile more tenderness, at times; at others, more meaning.  It is scarcely necessary to say that both had that delicacy of outline which seems almost inseparable from the female form in this country.  What was, perhaps, more usual in that day among persons of their class than it is in our own, each spoke her own language with an even graceful utterance, and a faultless accuracy of pronunciation, equally removed from effort and provincialisms.  As the Dutch was in very common use then, at Albany, and most females of Dutch origin had a slight touch of their mother tongue in their enunciation of English, this purity of dialect in the two girls was to be ascribed to the fact that their father was an Englishman by birth; their mother an American of purely English origin, though named after a Dutch god-mother; and the head of the school in which they had now been three years, was a native of London, and a lady by habits and education.

“Now, Maud,” cried the captain, after he had kissed the forehead, eyes and cheeks of his smiling little favourite—­“Now, Maud, I will set you to guess what good news I have for you and Beulah.”

“You and mother don’t mean to go to that bad Beave Manor this summer, as some call the ugly pond?” answered the child, quick as lightning.

“That is kind of you, my darling; more kind than prudent; but you are not right.”

“Try Beulah, now,” interrupted the mother, who, while she too doted on her youngest child, had an increasing respect for the greater solidity and better judgment of her sister:  “let us hear Beulah’s guess.”

“It is something about my brother, I know by mother’s eyes,” answered the eldest girl, looking inquiringly into Mrs. Willoughby’s face.

“Oh! yes,” cried Maud, beginning to jump about the room, until she ended her saltations in her father’s arms—­“Bob has got his commission!—­I know it all well enough, now—­I would not thank you to tell me—­I know it all now—­dear Bob, how he will laugh! and how happy I am!”

“Is it so, mother?” asked Beulah, anxiously, and without even a smile.

“Maud is right; Bob is an ensign—­or, will be one, in a day or two.  You do not seem pleased, my child?”

“I wish Robert were not a soldier, mother.  Now he will be always away, and we shall never see him; then he may be obliged to fight, and who knows how unhappy it may make him?”