“How Quixotic you can be!  However, it is no use exciting ourselves to-night.  One likes to keep the peace at Yule-tide, and so I will bow down to your idol as much as I can conscientiously.”

Charlotte made no answer.  She had risen hastily, and with rather unnecessary vigor was rattling the ewer and basin, and plashing out the water.  Sophia came back into the room, arranged the glass at the proper angle to give her a last comprehensive review of herself; and this being quite satisfactory, she went away with a smiling complacency, and a subdued excitement of manner, which in some peculiar way revealed to Charlotte the real position of affairs between her sister and Julius Sandal.

“She might have told me.”  She dashed the water over her face at the implied complaint; and it was easy to see, from the impatient way in which she subsequently unbound her hair, and pulled the comb through it, and from the irritability of all her movements, that she felt the omission to be a slight, not only indicating something not quite pleasant in the past, but prefiguring also she knew not what disagreeable feelings for the future.

“It is not Sophia’s fault,” she muttered; “Julius is to blame for it.  I think he really hates me now.  He has said to her, ’There is no need to tell Charlotte, specially; it will make her of too much importance.  I don’t approve of Charlotte in many ways.’  Oh, I know you, sir!” and with the thought she pulled the string of her necklace so impatiently that it broke; and the golden beads fell to her feet, and rolled hither and thither about the room.

The incident calmed her.  She finished her toilet in haste, and went down-stairs.  All the rooms were lighted, and she saw Julius and Sophia pacing up and down the main parlor, hand in hand, so interested in their sotto voce conversation as to be quite unconscious that she had stood a moment at the open door for their recognition.  So she passed on without troubling them.  She heard her mother’s happy laugh in the large dining-room, and she guessed from its tone that Harry was with her.  Mrs. Sandal was beautifully dressed in black satin, and she held in her hand a handsome silver salver.  Evidently she had been about to leave the room with it, when detained by some remark of her son’s; for she was half-way between the table and the door, her pretty, kindly face all alight with love and happiness.

Harry was standing on the hearth-rug, facing the room,—­a splendidly handsome young fellow in a crimson and yellow uniform.  He was in the midst of a hearty laugh, but when he saw Charlotte there was a sudden and wonderful transformation in his face.  It grew in a moment much finer, more thoughtful, wistful, human.  He sprang forward, took her in his arms, and kissed her.  Then he held her from him a little, looked at her again, and kissed her again; and with that last kiss he whispered, “You good sister.  You saved me, Charlotte, with that five hundred pounds.”