was raw; now, Cynthia’s face lighted up with spirit, and her whole body showed her ill-repressed agitation, but she only said a few sharp words, expressive of anything but kindly feeling towards the gentleman, and then bade Molly never name his name to her again.  Still, the latter could not imagine that he was more than intensely distasteful to her friend, as well as to herself, he could not be the cause of Cynthia’s present indisposition.  But this indisposition lasted so many days without change or modification, that even Mrs. Gibson noticed it, and Molly became positively uneasy.  Mrs. Gibson considered Cynthia’s quietness and languor as the natural consequence of ‘dancing with everybody who asked her’ at the ball.  Partners whose names were in the ‘Red Book’ would not have produced half the amount of fatigue, according to Mrs. Gibson’s judgment apparently, and if Cynthia had been quite well, very probably she would have hit the blot in her mother’s speech with one of her touches of sarcasm.  Then, again, when Cynthia did not rally, Mrs. Gibson grew impatient, and accused her of being fanciful and lazy; at length, and partly at Molly’s instance, there came an appeal to Mr. Gibson, and a professional examination of the supposed invalid, which Cynthia hated more than anything, especially when the verdict was, that there was nothing very much the matter, only a general lowness of tone, and depression of health and spirits, which would soon be remedied by tonics, and, meanwhile, she was not to be urged to exertion.

‘If there is one thing I dislike,’ said Cynthia to Mr. Gibson, after he had pronounced tonics to be the cure for her present state, ’it is the way doctors have of giving tablespoonfuls of nauseous mixtures as a certain remedy for sorrows and cares.’  She laughed up in his face as she spoke; she had always a pretty word and smile for him, even in the midst of her loss of spirits.

’Come! you acknowledge you have “sorrows” by that speech; we’ll make a bargain:  if you’ll tell me your sorrows and cares, I’ll try and find some other remedy for them than giving you what you are pleased to term my nauseous mixtures.’

‘No,’ said Cynthia, colouring; ’I never said I had sorrows and cares; I spoke generally.  What should I have a sorrow about—­you and Molly are only too kind to me,’ her eyes filling with tears.

’Well, well, we’ll not talk of such gloomy things, and you shall have some sweet emulsion to disguise the taste of the bitters I shall be obliged to fall back upon.’

’Please, don’t.  If you but knew how I dislike emulsions and disguises!  I do want bitters—­and if I sometimes—­if I’m obliged to—­if I’m not truthful myself, I do like truth in others—­at least, sometimes.’  She ended her sentence with another smile, bus it was rather faint and watery.