We always had a little boy to play with, Lu and I, or rather Lu,—­because, though he never took any dislike to me, he was absurdly indifferent, while he followed Lu about with a painful devotion.  I didn’t care, didn’t know; and as I grew up and grew awkwarder, I was the plague of their little lives.  If Lu had been my sister instead of my orphan cousin, as mamma was perpetually holding up to me, I should have bothered them twenty times more; but when I got larger and began to be really distasteful to his fine artistic perception, mamma had the sense to keep me out of his way; and he was busy at his lessons, and didn’t come so much.  But Lu just fitted him then, from the time he daubed little adoring blotches of her face on every barn-door and paling, till when his scrap-book was full of her in all fancies and conceits, and he was old enough to go away and study Art.  Then he came home occasionally, and always saw us; but I generally contrived, on such occasions, to do some frightful thing that shocked every nerve he had, and he avoided me instinctively as he would an electric torpedo; but—­do you believe?—­I never had an idea of such a thing, till, when sailing from the South, so changed, I remembered things, and felt intuitively how it must have been.  Shortly after I went away, he visited Europe.  I had been at home a year, and now we heard he had returned; so for two years he hadn’t seen me.  He had written a great deal to Lu,—­brotherly letters they were,—­he is so peculiar,—­determining not to give her the least intimation of what he felt, if he did feel anything, till he was able to say all.  And now he had earned for himself a certain fame, a promise of greater; his works sold; and if he pleased, he could marry.  I merely presume this might have been his thought; he never told me.  A certain fame!  But that’s nothing to what he will have.  How can he paint gray, faint, half-alive things now?  He must abound in color,—­be rich, exhaustless:  wild sea-sketches,—­sunrise,—­sunset,—­mountain mists rolling in turbid crimson masses, breaking in a milky spray of vapor round lofty peaks, and letting out lonely glimpses of a melancholy moon,—­South American splendors,—­pomps of fruit and blossom,—­all this affluence of his future life must flash from his pencils now.  Not that he will paint again directly.  Do you suppose it possible that I should be given him merely for a phase of wealth and light and color, and then taken,—­taken, in some dreadful way, to teach him the necessary and inevitable result of such extravagant luxuriance?  It makes me shiver.

It was that very noon when papa brought in the amber, that he came for the first time since his return from Europe.  He hadn’t met Lu before.  I ran, because I was in my morning wrapper.  Don’t you see it there, that cream-colored, undyed silk, with the dear palms and ferns swimming all over it?  And all my hair was just flung into a little black net that Lu had made me; we both had run down as we