the fashionable school and the set of girls I was getting intimate with.  I wasn’t intimate with mamma then; I didn’t want to be.  The other girls were not, and I thought it would be silly; think of it, Bell!  Well, I was sent, a forlorn and furious child (fifteen years old though, the same age as dear, sweet Gertrude), to my mother’s old nurse in the country,—­a farmer’s wife, living on a small farm, twenty miles from a city.  There, my dear, I first learned that there was a world outside the city of New York.  I must tell you all about it some day,—­the happy, blessed time I had with those dear people, and how I learned to know my own dearest ones while I was away from them.  I buried that first Hildegarde, very dead, oh, very dead indeed!  Then the next summer I went to a new world, and my Rose went with me.  I have told you about her, and how sweet she is, and how ill she was, and now how she is going to marry the good doctor who cured her of her lameness.  We spent the summer with Cousin Wealthy Bond, a cousin of my mother’s,—­the loveliest old lady, living down in Maine.  That was a very new world, Bell; and oh!  I have a child there, a little boy, my Benny.  At least, he is Cousin Wealthy’s Benny now, for she is bringing him up as her own, and loves him really as if he were; but I always think of him as partly mine, because Rose and I found him in the hospital where we used to go to carry flowers.  He had been very ill, and we got Cousin Wealthy to let him come to her house to get well.  And through, that, somehow, there came to be a little convalescent home for the children from the hospital,—­oh, I must tell you that story too, some day, and it is called Joyous Gard.  Yes, of course I named it, and I was there for a month this spring, before you came, and had the most enchanting time.  I took Hugh with me, and the only trouble was that Benny was madly jealous of him, and gave him no peace.  Poor Benny! he is a dear, nice little boy, but not like Hugh, of course, and that exasperated him past belief.  It was just like Lord Lardy and the waiter in the Bab Ballad, for Hugh was entirely unconscious, and would smile peacefully at Benny’s demonstrations of wrath, thinking it all a joke.

“Oh, I could talk all day about Benny and Cousin Wealthy, and nice, funny Mrs. Brett, and all of them.  Well, then, two years ago came our trouble, you know.  Dear papa died, and we came out here, feeling very strange and lost.  It was sad at first, of course; but oh, we have had such peace and happiness together, my mother dear and I!  The last year, when we had grown used to doing without the dear one, and knew—­but mamma always knew it—­that we must make happiness for each other,—­the last year has been a most lovely time.  But sweet and happy as it has all been, Bell, still I have always had a small circle to love and to be with.  Mamma, bless her, and at one time one set of dear friends, and at another time another; never many people at once, and life peaceful and lovely, but one day pretty much like another, you see.  But since you all came, I have been in a new world altogether,—­a great, merry, laughing world, with such lots of children and fun—­”