Accordingly, she returned to Mrs. Mason, who, wishing to retire early, soon dismissed her to her own room, where she for some time amused herself with watching the daylight as it gradually disappeared from the hills which lay beyond the pond.  Then when it all was gone, and the stars began to come out, she turned her eyes towards one, which had always seemed to her to be her mother’s soul, looking down upon her from the windows of heaven.  Now, to-night there shone beside it a smaller, feebler one, and in the fleecy cloud which floated around it, she fancied she could define the face of her baby sister.  Involuntarily stretching out her hands, she cried, “Oh, mother, Allie, I am so happy now;” and to the child’s imagination the stars smiled lovingly upon her, while the evening wind, as it gently moved the boughs of the tall elm trees, seemed like the rustle of angels’ wings.  Who shall say the mother’s spirit was not there to rejoice with her daughter over the glad future opening so brightly before her?

CHAPTER XIV.

VISITORS.

The Tuesday following Mary’s arrival at Mrs. Mason’s, there was a social gathering at the house of Mr. Knight.  This gathering could hardly be called a tea party, but came more directly under the head of an “afternoon’s visit,” for by two o’clock every guest had arrived, and the “north room” was filled with ladies, whose tongues, like their hands, were in full play.  Leathern reticules, delicate embroidery, and gold thimbles were not then in vogue in Rice Corner; but on the contrary, some of Mrs. Knight’s visitors brought with them large, old-fashioned work-bags, from which the ends of the polished knitting-needles were discernible; while another apologized for the magnitude of her work, saying that “her man had fretted about his trousers until she herself began to think it was time to finish them; and so when she found Miss Mason wasn’t to be there, she had just brought them along.”

In spite of her uniform kindness, Mrs. Mason was regarded by some of her neighbors as a bugbear, and this allusion to her immediately turned the conversation in that direction.

“Now, do tell,” said Widow Perkins, vigorously rapping her snuff-box and passing it around.  “Now, do tell if it’s true that Miss Mason has took a girl from the town-house?”

On being assured that such was the fact, she continued “Now I will give up.  Plagued as she is for things, what could have possessed her?”

“I was not aware that she was very much troubled to live,” said Mrs. Knight, whose way of thinking, and manner of expressing herself, was entirely unlike Mrs. Perkins.