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and her mother chatted by the fire and ate a leisurely breakfast, Bella unpacked her new gowns with loving care. One by one she tried them on and paraded before her admiring audience, while Fred still slept in the adjoining room.
    "That pale rose is beautiful, my dear," nodded Mrs. Meade approvingly as Bella, happier than she had been in ages, walked back and forth in front of her mother. "It makes your ebony hair stand out. I'll wager there's not a girl in fifty miles around here that can hold a candle to you. Think you not, Celia?"
    "It will not do to turn her head, Mama," said Celia repressively. "Not a day goes by that you don't tell Bella about her beauty. She should be thinking also of other things. Beauty fades eventually, and she will have nothing to fall back on when this happens."
    "Do try a more cheerful attitude, Celia." countered Mrs. Meade. "What else should be in a young girl's mind but balls and soirees and how her beauty will give her the advantage in them? I hope you don't mean to make a bluestocking of our Bella, when that has been a point of contention between you and me for as long as I can remember."
    "Bella a bluestocking?" laughed Celia, "No Mama, that’s not what I meant. What I meant to point is that—never mind, it’s not important. What we should be concerned with now is how we are to broach the subject of the lamentable way in which our arrival has been treated by our cousins when next we see Uncle Worth."
    "Perhaps they have a reasonable excuse," said Mrs. Meade, not wanting to cast a pall on their first meeting with Worth, and place in jeopardy the luxurious life that now lay before them.
    "Oh, darling, that is beautiful," said Mrs. Meade as Bella came now before them in a walking dress of cobalt blue merino with a matching pelisse and a grey rabbit fur muff. Celia had insisted in a warm gown for going outdoors, overriding her mother and Bella's objections. Impractical as they both were, they would have spent their limited resources on gauze and silk, with never a thought for the biting winter that would come after their summer here. Bella had also donned the matching bonnet of thick wool with a rim of the same fur and silk ribbons and now Mrs. Meade's eyes shone with pride as she gazed at the vision of beauty before her.
    "Celia, does not Bella look like a doll right out of a box?"
    "Yes, she does," said Celia, impressed in spite of her resolution not to comment so much on Bella's beauty.
    Bella went back to her bedroom to change into the fourth gown and Celia gazed around her. The suite of rooms assigned to them in the east wing was made up of two large and two smaller ones. Celia insisted her mother and Bella take the two larger ones while she would settle on one of the smaller ones that had an attached alcove and Fred would take the other.
    She would use the alcove as a studio for it was almost as large as her bedroom and looked forward to setting it up with much anticipation. Apparently the alcove in the smaller room that she had chosen for herself had at one time been used as a schoolroom for there were signs of study on the worn scratched surface of a long narrow table on which she would make sketches. There was also a cabinet that could hold all her brushes and paints.
    Celia had never had so much room for her art things and she thought she would spend some time arranging her study, finding the best place for her easel and paints and brushes and rearranging the furniture. As these two rooms were in a corner, the bedroom had a window that faced east and the alcove a window that faced north.
    She was as excited and happy with the anticipation of working in her studio as Bella was in her new wardrobe. She also looked forward to exploring the pretty grounds and the small wood that belonged to Rook's End which she could see from the window. Beyond the wood and in the far distance, the square turrets of Shelton Hall rose above a dark forest that adjoined the Delaney land.

 
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