How had she got out? Through the door, and probably had left the house while everyone was at prayers, so that she had slipped away unobserved.

"So that is over," said she to herself in a depressed way, "and there is nothing more to expect now."

She took a roll of bread and sundry cakes, with which she had filled her pockets before coming up-stairs, and laid them on the table, and then, with the air and movements of one who had recently undergone some great fatigue, she began slowly and wearily to undress. She was in her dressing-gown, and brushing her hair when she went up to the side of the bed to let down the curtain, but in the same moment that she did this, she gave a great jump and a scream. On her pillow lay a head covered with crisp, shining golden curls, a little fair face nestled there, with closed eyes and rosy lips slightly parted. Olga had taken possession of her bed, and was sleeping so soundly that no noise Clarice had made since she

entered the room had reached her brain through the closed portals of the senses.

But Clarice's scream woke her in a moment. She opened her blue eyes, and said, "Where can I be?"

Then Clarice, half-angry and half-frightened, took hold of her small white shoulders, shook her slightly, and said, "How dare you get into my bed!"

Olga laughed a little and nestled herself down on the pillow. "What could I do?" she cried. "I was so tired-so tired, and I had only the bare boards to crouch on. I heard your Ann go away, and then I took off some of my dusty, dusty clothes, and I was obliged to get into your bed, my dear, because there was no other. Oh, do let me go to sleep again! Get in quick, I'll make room for you;-I will indeed," she added, as if she was proposing to do rather a meritorious thing.

"Yes," said Clarice discontentedly; "but I am not at all sleepy, and there is so much I want to hear. I must know a great deal more about you

if I am to keep you, and it was so very, very imprudent of you to leave that safe cupboard. Suppose only just suppose—anybody had come in and found you here!".

"It would have been such fun!" cried Olga, laughing. "They'd have thought you had moulted yellow, and got rid of all your pretty brown feathers;" and she took hold of one of Clarice's long dark curls, and gave it a little twitch, with a friendly, roguish look in her eyes.

"I brought you a great deal to eat," answered Clarice in an injured tone.

Olga sat up in the bed and clapped her hands. "Oh, you did, you did, you good, dear brown bird! give it me, give it me-I am dying with hunger; I could eat those baby beetles, and the very dog's meat itself, with a relish now. I really believe I could."

Then she took the roll and the cakes, and ate them in a pretty dainty way-more like a delicate fairy than a ravenous mortal girl.

Olga!" said Clarice, gravely, "I must have

some serious talk with you.

name?"

What is your other

"Leslie; Papa is Colonel Leslie, one of the Scotch Leslies, you know. Oh, if you could see him in Highland costume, with a little dagger in his sandled knee!"

Clarice sighed, and thought regretfully of her father's pepper-and-salt trousers.

"And where were you at school?"

"At York, dear."

"At York! Oh, Olga! you don't mean to say that you ran away all the way from York, here." "Yes, I did indeed-in a railway."

"Oh, in a railway!"

"Yes; I put on the housemaid's cloak and bonnet; and in the very middle of the night, when everybody was fast asleep, I got out of the window on to the top of the porch, and then I scampered down the trellis like a cat, and walked off by moonlight a mile and a-half to the station—we are not in York, you know, only in a suburb-and there I got a ticket, and a train was just coming