lounging in the window-seat, holding a three-days’-old newspaper in her hand, which she was making a pretence of reading, when she was startled by her mother’s saying—

“Cynthia! can’t you take up a book and improve yourself? I am sure your conversation will never be worth listening to unless you read something better than newspapers. Why don’t you keep up your French? There was some French book that Molly was reading—Le Règne Animal, I think.”

“No! I never read it!” said Molly, blushing. “Mr. Roger Hamley sometimes read pieces out of it, when I was first at the Hall, and told me what it was about.”

“Oh! well. Then I suppose I was mistaken. But it comes to all the same thing. Cynthia, you really must learn to settle yourself to some improving reading every morning.”

Rather to Molly’s surprise, Cynthia did not reply a word; but dutifully went and brought down from among her Boulogne school-books Le Siècle de Louis XIV. But, after a while, Molly saw that this “improving reading” was just as much a mere excuse for Cynthia’s thinking her own thoughts as the newspaper had been.