having been at school. But a second absence from home was preparing for her. Mrs. Harcourt staid two days again on her way home. She had heard of a first-rate school; Mabel's deficiencies were sedulously brought forward; and Mr. Dacre again convinced of the propriety of a remedy.
This time Mrs. Harcourt herself consigned her to the care of Mrs. Weston, certainly with a very unflattered character. Depressed at parting with her grandfather, mortified by her aunt, and remembering the ill success of her first trial, Mabel sat and cried in the window seat. The first week was very miserable. Embarrassed by so many strangers, hopeless with observing so much of accomplishment, Mabel was in a state of depression that any person less in the habit of making allowance than Mrs. Weston would have taken for absolute sullenness.
One morning, while gazing sorrowfully on the parapet, and thinking how melancholy a window was that only looked to the tops of houses, she observed something dark on the wall. She opened the casement, and saw that it was a robin, lying apparently dead. A robin! it was like an old friend: forgetting all the trouble of which her last bird had been the cause, Mabel caught it up and found that
