“Beggars can not be choosers,” began Hilary.

“Beggars!” echoed Selina.

“No, my dear, we were never that,” said Miss Leaf, interposing against one of the sudden storms that were often breaking out between these two.  “You know well we have never begged or borrowed from any body, and hardly ever been indebted to any body, except for the extra lessons that Mr. Lyon would insist upon giving to Ascott at home.”

Here Johanna suddenly stopped, and Hilary, with a slight color rising in her face, said—­

“I think, sisters, we are forgetting that the staircase is quite open, and though I am sure she has an honest look and not that of a listener, still Elizabeth might hear.  Shall I call her down stairs, and tell her to light a fire in the parlor?”

While she is doing it, and in spite of Selina’s forebodings to the contrary, the small maiden did it quickly and well, especially after a hint or two from Hilary—­let me take the opportunity of making a little picture of this same Hilary.

Little it should be, for she was a decidedly little woman:  small altogether, hands, feet, and figure being in satisfactory proportion.  Her movements, like those of most little women, were light and quick rather than elegant; yet every thing she did was done with a neatness and delicacy which gave an involuntary sense of grace and harmony.  She was, in brief, one of those people who are best described by the word “harmonious;” people who never set your teeth on edge, or rub you up the wrong way, as very excellent people occasionally do.  Yet she was not over-meek or unpleasantly amiable; there was a liveliness and even briskness about her, as if the every day wine of her life had a spice of Champagniness, not frothiness but natural effervescence of spirit, meant to “cheer but not inebriate” a household.

And in her own household this gift was most displayed.  No centre of a brilliant, admiring circle could be more charming, more witty, more irresistibly amusing than was Hilary sitting by the kitchen fire, with the cat on her knee, between her two sisters, and the school-boy Ascott Leaf, their nephew—­which four individuals, the cat being not the least important of them, constituted the family.

In the family, Hilary shone supreme.  All recognized her as the light of the house, and so she had been, ever since she was born, ever since her

    “Dying mother mild,
     Said, with accents undefiled,
    ‘Child, be mother to this child.’”

It was said to Johanna Leaf—­who was not Mrs. Leaf’s own child.  But the good step-mother, who had once taken the little motherless girl to her bosom, and never since made the slightest difference between her and her own children, knew well whom she was trusting.

From that solemn hour, in the middle of the night, when she lifted the hour-old baby out of its dead mother’s bed into her own, it became Johanna’s one object in life.  Through a sickly infancy, for it was a child born amidst trouble, her sole hands washed, dressed, fed it; night and day it “lay in her bosom, and was unto her as a daughter.”