Bluebell complied, and, settling the ladies on either side of a papier-mache table, opened the piano, and began dreamily playing through the music of the night before.  Trove, finding the door ajar, had pushed in, and lay near the instrument, listening in that strange way some dogs do if the tones come from the heart, and not merely the fingers.

Having got through the last evening’s repertoire, she sat musing on the music-stool, and then crooned rather low an old song of her mother’s, beginning,—­

  “They tell me thou art the favoured guest
    In many a gay and brilliant throng;
   No wit like thine to wake the jest,
    No voice like thine to raise the song.”

“Oh! that is too old-fashioned,” said Mrs. Leigh, and Miss Opie coughed dryly.  But why need Bluebell have blushed so consciously, as she dashed into Lightning galops and Tom Tiddler quadrilles, till Trove, like a dog of taste, took his offended ears and outraged nerves off to his lair in the lobby?

His fair mistress soon after sought her bower, a scantily furnished retreat, but, like most girls’ rooms, taking a certain amount of individuality from its occupier.  Everything in the little room was blue, and each article a present.  Photographs of school friends were suspended from the wall with ribbons of her name-sake colour.  It was in the earlier days of the art, when a stony stare, pursed lips, and general rigidity were considered essential to the production of the portrait.

Blue, also, were the pincushion and glass toilet implements on the dressing-table, and a rocking-chair had its cushion embroidered in bluebells—­a tribute of affection from a late schoolfellow.

The bed was curtainless, and neutral except as to its blue valance, and the carpet only cocoa-nut matting, which, however, harmonized fairly with the prevailing cerulean effect.

Bluebell was writing in a book, guarded by a Bramah, some profound reflections on “First Impressions.”  She never lost the key nor forgot to lock this volume—­a saving clause of common-sense protecting a farrago of nonsence.

“Ces beaux jours, quand j’etais si malheureux.”  Have you ever, reader, taken up an old journal written in early youth, and thought how those intensely black and white days have now mingled into unnoticeable grey, half-thankful that the old ghosts are laid, half-regretful for that keener susceptibility to joy and sorrow gone by?  Then, as “the hand that has written it lays it aside,” there is, perhaps, a pang at the reflection of how the paths now diverge of those who once walked together as—­

  “Time turns the old days to derision,
     Our loves into corpses—­or wives;
   And marriage, and death, and division,
     Make barren our lives.”

But Bluebell knows nothing of that.  She is at the scribbling age, and can actually endure to describe, as if they were new and entirely original, the dawning follies of seventeen.