“Well, to think of your having all at once struck up such a violent friendship with that stiff, quiet Miss Eastwood!” exclaimed Stella, who thought her cousin’s choice of a friend rather unaccountable.  Lucy’s efforts to draw together her cousin and her friend were unsuccessful, and perhaps this was quite as much Mary’s fault as Stella’s, arising from her strong feeling against cultivating intimacy with any one who was “of the world.”  It was almost the only practical point on which she and Lucy disagreed, for Lucy tried to persuade her that she might do real good if she would come more in contact with her irreligious schoolmates.  But Mary replied that this might do for some, but she did not feel strong enough,—­she might herself be led away.  She was not yet fully persuaded in her own mind.

So Lucy gave up the point, and had a somewhat difficult position to maintain between her cousin and her friend,—­not that Mary was ever jealous, but Stella did not at all like the affection her friends to be diverted towards any one else; indeed, it was the only thing that ever seemed really to a “put her out.”  She was conscious to some extent that a much deeper sympathy existed between Lucy and Miss Eastwood than between Lucy and her, and she feared that if it increased, her cousin’s regard for her must necessarily diminish.

One bright, sunny October day, when the air was clear and bracing, and the wind was tossing the red leaves that fell from the trees in the squares, Lucy and Stella were on their way home from school, when they heard at a slight distance the plaintive strains of a hand-organ, carried by a meagre, careworn Italian, who seemed to be working his instrument mechanically, while his eye had a fixed, sad, stedfast gaze, unconscious, seemingly, of anything around him.  Lucy was looking compassionately at the dark, sorrowful face, and wondering what his previous history might have been, when her eye was suddenly caught by the familiar form and face of the girl who stood by with her tambourine, singing a simple ditty, which somehow brought old days at Ashleigh back to her mind.  The figure she saw, though arrayed in tattered garments, and the face, though sunburnt to a deep brown, were not so much altered as to prevent almost instant recognition.  Lucy grasped Stella’s arm, and exclaimed, “Why, it’s Nelly!” and before the astonished Stella comprehended her meaning, she hastily stepped forward towards the tambourine-girl, who almost at the same moment stopped singing and sprang forward, exclaiming, “Oh, it’s Miss Lucy, her own self!”

Both were quite unconscious, in their surprise, of the bystanders around them; but Stella was by no means so insensible to the situation, and was somewhat scandalized at being connected with such a scene “in the street.”  She begged Lucy to ask Nelly to follow them home, which was not far off, and then they could have any number of explanations at leisure.  Lucy at once assented, and asked Nelly if she could be spared for a little while.  With a happy face, flushed with her surprise and delight, Nelly went up to the organ-grinder and said a few words, at which he smiled and nodded.  She then followed her friends home at a respectful distance, while the man went on his way from house to house.