“It is green tea,” said Helen; “don’t drink it, Verry.”

“Green tea,” she said, in a dreamy voice.  “We drank green tea ten years ago, in our old house; and I did not know it!  Cassandra, do you remember that I drank four cups once, when mother had company?  I laughed all night, and Temperance cried.”

She contributed her share toward entertaining, and invariably received the most attention.  My indifference was called pride, and her reserve was called dignity, and dignity was more popular than pride.

Before Helen went, Ben wrote me that he was going to India.  It was a favorite journey with the Belemites.  By the time the letter reached me he should be gone.  Would I bear him in remembrance?  He would not forget me, and promised me an Indian idol.  In eighteen months he expected to be at home again; sooner, perhaps.  P.S.  Would I give his true regards to my sister?  N.B.  The property might be divided according to his grandfather’s will, before his return, and he wanted to be out of the way for sundry reasons, which he hoped to tell me some day.  I read the letter to Helen and Veronica.  Helen laughed, and said “Unstable as water”; but Veronica looked displeased; she closed her eyes as if to recall him to mind, and asked Helen abruptly if she did not like him.

“Yes; but I doubt him.  With all his strength of character he has a capacity for failure.”

“I consider him a relation,” I said.

“I do not own him,” said Veronica.

“At all events, he is not an affectionate one,” Helen remarked.  “You have not heard from him in a year.”

“But I knew that I should hear,” I said.

“We shall see him,” said Veronica, “again.”

I was dull after I received his letter.  My youth grew dim; somehow I felt a self-pity.  I found no chance to embalm those phases of sensation which belonged to my period, and I grew careless; Helen’s influence went with her.  The observances so vital to Veronica, so charming in her, I became utterly neglectful of.  For all this a mad longing sometimes seized me to depart into a new world, which should contain no element of the old, least of all a reminiscence of what my experience had made me.

CHAPTER XXVI.

Alice Morgeson sent for Aunt Merce, asking her to fulfill the promise she had made when she was in Rosville.

With misgivings she went, stayed a month, and returned with Alice.  I felt a throe of pain when we met, which she must have seen, for she turned pale, and the hand she had extended toward me fell by her side; overcoming the impulse, she offered it again, but I did not take it.  I had no evidence to prove that she came to Surrey on my account; but I was sure that such was the fact, as I was sure that there was a bond between us, which she did not choose to break, nor to acknowledge.  She appeared as if expecting some explanation or revelation from me; but I gave