“I wish—­” began Hilda; but she checked herself in her response to the wish, as the thought of Madge’s five brothers rose in her mind (Hilda could not endure boys!), looked attentively at the toe of her little bronze slipper for a few moments, and then changed the subject by proposing a walk.  “Console yourself with the caramels, my fiery Madge,” she said, pushing the box across the table, “while I put on my boots.  We will go to Maillard’s and get some more while we are out.  His caramels are decidedly better than Huyler’s; don’t you think so!”

A very busy woman was pretty Mrs. Graham during the next two weeks.  First she made an expedition into the country “to see an old friend,” she said, and was gone two whole days.  And after that she was out every morning, driving hither and thither, from shop to dressmaker, from dressmaker to milliner, from milliner to shoemaker.

“It is a sad thing,” Mr. Graham would say, when his wife fluttered in to lunch, breathless and exhausted and half an hour late (she, the most punctual of women!),—­“it is a sad thing to have married a comet by mistake, thinking it was a woman.  How did you find the other planets this morning, my dear?  Is it true that Saturn has lost one of his rings? and has the Sun recovered from his last attack of spots?  I really fear,” he would add, turning to Hilda, “that this preternatural activity in your comet-parent portends some alarming change in the—­a—­atmospheric phenomena, my child.  I would have you on your guard!” and then he would look at her and sigh, shake his head, and apply himself to the cold chicken with melancholy vigor.

Hilda thought nothing of her father’s remarks,—­papa was always talking nonsense, and she thought she always understood him perfectly.  It did occur to her, however, to wonder at her mother’s leaving her out on all her shopping expeditions.  Hilda rather prided herself on her skill in matching shades and selecting fabrics, and mamma was generally glad of her assistance in all such matters.  However, perhaps it was only under-clothing and house-linen, and such things that she was buying.  All that was the prosy part of shopping.  It was the poetry of it that Hilda loved,—­the shimmer of silk and satin, the rich shadows in velvet, the cool, airy fluttering of lawn and muslin and lace.  So the girl went on her usual way, finding life a little dull, a little tiresome, and most people rather stupid, but everything on the whole much as usual, if her head only would not ache so; and it was without a shadow of suspicion that she obeyed one morning her mother’s summons to come and see her in her dressing-room.