than does she.  She will have it that the hall, thus improved, and hung with a few old pictures, some bits of ancient armor, and carpeted with maroon and green will be truly baronial.  You and she will agree admirably in your enthusiastic love of the venerable, and in your aesthetic tastes.  I congratulate myself hourly upon my good fortune in securing such a companion for myself, and such an instructress for yourself.  You cannot fail to derive infinite benefit from intercourse with her.

“This brings me to another subject to which I desire to call your immediate attention.  I wish her to select a couple of dresses suitable for your wear on the night of our reception-party, and at others which will, undoubtedly, be given in our honor.  She objects to doing this unless I obtain from you a written request that she should thus aid me.  She fears you may consider her action ’premature and officious.’  Write to her at once, requesting her to do this sisterly favor for you, setting forth your distance from the city, the meagre assortment of the goods to be had in the Richmond stores, etc., and giving her carte blanche as to cost and style.  It will be an inestimable advantage to your appearance on the occasions named should she oblige you in this particular.  I earnestly desire that you should look your best at your introduction to her.”

“‘Maroon and green!’ a ‘baronial’ hall, and new party-dresses for insignificant me!” Mabel stopped to say aloud in great amusement.  “What would my sage brother have said to such paltry memoranda six months ago?  He is an apt scholar, or he has an able teacher.  Ah, well! love is a marvellous transmogrifier!”

With this apothegm from the storehouse of her lately acquired wisdom, she passed to the next paragraph.

“Now for another matter about which I meant to write to you yesterday, but I was prevented by our expedition to Lowell.  The evenings I of course devote to Clara.  I have not been so engrossed by my own very important concerns as to neglect yours.  I stopped a day in Philadelphia, illy as I could afford the time, to make such investigations as I could, without exciting invidious suspicion, into the character of the person whom I found domesticated at Ridgeley on my return from my summer tour.  The information I picked up in that cautious city was so meagre and tantalizing as to provoke me into the belief that he had selected his references with an eye to the slenderness of their knowledge of his personal history.  Accident, however, has since placed within my reach a means of learning all that I wish to know.  Without wearying you with explanations, which, indeed, I have no time to write—­being engaged to drive out with Clara in an hour from this time—­I will transcribe a portion of a letter received by me, two days since, from a gentleman of unexceptional standing, and upon whose word you may safely depend.