towards whom, indeed, her feelings seemed not so much to be confidence as involuntary affection.

I should have thought all the better of my own qualities had Priscilla marked me out for the third place in her regards. But, though she appeared to like me tolerably well, I could never flatter myself with being distinguished by her as Hollingsworth and Zenobia were.

One forenoon, during my convalescence, there came a gentle tap at my chamber door. I immediately said, “Come in, Priscilla!” with an acute sense of the applicant’s identity. Nor was I deceived. It was really Priscilla, — a pale, large-eyed little woman (for she had gone far enough into her teens to be, at least, on the outer limit of girlhood), but much less wan than at my previous view of her,