My mother looked at me strangely and sighed, but answered nothing.

About this time my father showed some inclination to repress our growing disposition to spend money extravagantly in dress.  Nothing but hundred-dollar shawl would suit my ideas.  Ada White had been presented by her father with a hundred-dollar cashmere, and I did not mean to be put off with anything less.

“Father, I want a hundred dollars,” said I to him one morning as he was leaving the house, after eating his light breakfast.  He had grown dyspeptic, and had to be careful and sparing in his diet.

“A hundred dollars!” He looked surprised; in fact, I noticed that my request made him start.  “What do you want with so much money?”

“I have nothing seasonable to wear,” said I, very firmly; “and as I must have a shawl, I might as well get a good one while I am about it.  I saw one at Stewart’s yesterday that is just the thing.  Ada White’s father gave her a shawl exactly like it, and you must let me have the money to buy this one.  It will last my lifetime.”

“A hundred dollars is a large price for a shawl,” said my father, in his sober way.

Oh, dear, no!” was my emphatic answer; “a hundred dollars is a low price for a shawl.  Jane Wharton’s cost five hundred.”

“I’ll think about it,” said my father, turning from me rather abruptly.

When he came home at dinner-time, I was alone in the parlor, practicing a. new piece of music which my fashionable teacher had left me.  He was paid three dollars for every lesson.  My father smiled as he laid a hundred-dollar bill on the keys of the piano.  I started up, and kissing him, said, with the ardor of a pleased girl—­

“What a dear good father you are!”

The return was ample.  He always seemed most pleased when he could gratify some wish or supply some want of his children.  Ah! if we had been less selfish—­less exacting!

It was hardly to be expected that my sisters would see me the possessor of a hundred-dollar shawl, and not desire a like addition to their wardrobes.

“I want a hundred dollars,” said my sister Jane, on the next morning, as my father was about leaving for his store.

“Can’t spare it to-day, my child,” I heard him answer, kindly, but firmly.

“Oh, but I must have it,” urged my sister.

“I gave you twenty-five dollars only day before yesterday,” my father replied to this.  “What have you done with that?”

“Spent it for gloves and laces,” said Jane, in a light way, as if the sum were of the smallest possible consequence.

“I am not made of money, child.”  The tone of my father’s voice struck me as unusually sober—­almost sad.  But Jane replied instantly, and with something of reproach and complaint in her tones—­“I shouldn’t think you were, if you find it so hard to part with a hundred dollars.”

“I have a large payment to make to-day”—­my father spoke with unusual decision of manner—­“and shall need every dollar that I can raise.”