at her eyes or her lips, and were lost in the effort to decide. So one day Hughson felt emboldened to ask if he might bear her company to church on Sunday. And Miss Sadie,—as now they called her, for she objected to the name of Mercy, and nothing but Sadie could her friends make out of Mercedes,—Sadie, to please McMurtagh, consented.
But when the Sunday came, poor Hughson, who looked well enough in week-day clothes, became, to her quick eye, impossible in black.
"You see, Sadie, I am bright and early, to be your beau."
There is a fine directness about courtship in Hughson's class,—it puts the dots upon the i's; but Sadie must have preferred them dotless, for she said, "My name is not Sadie."
"Mercy."
"Nor Mercy."
"Mer—Mercedes, then."
"Nor Mercedes alone."
"Well, Miss McMurtagh, though I've known you from a child."
A shrug of Mercedes' pretty shoulders implied that this might be the last passport to her acquaintance as a woman. "Mr. Mc-
