Mr. Dicki'son interrupted his wife by a short laugh. "I didn't mean that at all"--he knew by long experience that it was useless to try to make her understand what he did mean--"but, now you speak of it, perhaps Ada Elizabeth's 'air don't make so much show as some of the others; it's like mine, and mine never was up to much--not but what there's scarcely enough left to tell what sort it is."

It was quite a long speech for the unsociable and quiet Mr. Dicki'son to come out with, and his wife passed it by without comment, only making a fretful reiteration of Ada Elizabeth's plainness and a complaint of the sorry figure she would cut among the great doings on the day of the school treat and distribution of prizes.

"Is our Ada Elizabeth a plain one?" said Mr. Dicki'son, with an air of astonishment which conveyed a genuine desire for information, then turned and scanned the child's burning face, after which he looked closely at the faces of the other children, so little like hers, and so nearly like that of his pretty, mindless, complaining wife. "Well, yes, little 'un, I suppose you're not exactly pretty," he admitted unwillingly; "you're like me, and I never was a beauty to look at. But, there, 'handsome is as handsome does,' and you've brought home first prize to-day, which you wouldn't have done, may be, if you'd always been on the grin, like Gerty there. Seems to me," he went on reflectively, "that that there first prize 'll stand by you when folks has got tired of Gerty's grin, that's what seems to me. I don't know," he went on, "that I set so much store by looks. I never was aught but a plain man, but I've made you a good husband, Em'ly, and you can't deny it. You'll mind that good-looking chap, Joe Webster, that you kept company with before you took up with me? He chucked you up for Eliza Moriarty. Well, I met her this morning, poor soul! with two black eyes and her lips strapped up with plaster. H'm!" with a sniff of self-approval, "seems to me I'd not care to change my plain looks for his handsome ones. 'Handsome is as handsome does' is my motto; and if I want aught doing for me, it's our Ada Elizabeth I asks to do it, that's all I know."

The great day of the school treat came and went. The dean's wife, Lady Margaret Adair, gave away the prizes, as she had promised, and was so struck with "our Ada Elizabeth's" timid and shrinking air that she kept her for a few minutes, while she told her that she had heard a very good account of her, and that she hoped she would go on and work harder than ever. "For I see," said Lady Margaret, looking at a paper in her hand, "that you are the first in your class for these subjects, and that you have carried off the regular attendance and good-conduct prize as well. I am sure you must be a very good little woman, and be a great favourite with your schoolmistress."

Mrs. Dicki'son--who, as the mother of the show pupil of the day, and as a person of much respectability in the neighbourhood, which was not famous for that old-fashioned virtue, had been given a seat as near as possible to the daïs on which Lady Margaret and the table of prizes were accommodated--heard the pleasant words of praise, which would have made most mothers' hearts throb with exultant pride, with but little of such a feeling; on the contrary, her whole mind was filled with regret that it was not Gerty standing on the edge of the daïs, instead of the unfortunate Ada Elizabeth, who did not show off well. If only it had been Gerty! Gerty would have answered my lady with a pretty blush and smile, and would have dropped her courtesy at the right moment, and would have been a credit to her mother generally.

But, alas! Gerty's glib tongue and ready smiles had not won her the prizes which had fallen to poor little plain Ada Elizabeth's share, and Gerty was out in the cold, so to speak, among the other scholars, while Ada Elizabeth, in an agony of shyness and confusion, stood on the edge of the daïs, first on one foot and then on the other, conscious that her mother's eyes were upon her and that their expression was not an approving one, feeling, though she would hardly have been able to put it into words, that in cutting so sorry a figure she was making her poor mother's trials more hard to bear than ever. Poor little plain child, she kept courtesying up and down like a mechanical doll, and saying, "Yes, 'm," and "No, 'm," at the wrong moments, and she altogether forgot that the fresh-coloured, buxom lady in the neat black gown and with only a bit of blue feather to relieve her black bonnet was not a "ma'am" at all, but a "my lady," who ought to have been addressed as such. At last, however, the ceremony, and the games and sports, and the big tea were all over, and Ada Elizabeth went home with her prizes to be a heroine no longer, for she soon, very soon, in the presence of Gerty's prettiness and Gerty's glib tongue and ready smiles, sank into the insignificance which had been her portion aforetime. She had not much encouragement to go on trying to be a credit to the family which she had so hardly tried by taking after her father, for nobody seemed to remember that she had been at the top of the tree at the great examination, or, if they did recall it, it was generally as an example of the schoolmistress's "awkwardness" of disposition in having passed over the hare for the tortoise. Yet sometimes, when Gerty was extra hard upon Ada Elizabeth's dulness, or Mrs. Dicki'son found the trial of her life more heavy to bear than usual, her father would look up from his dinner or his tea, as it might happen to be, and fix his slow gaze upon his eldest daughter's vivacious countenance.

"H'm! Our Ada Elizabeth's too stupid to live, is she? Well, you're like to know, Gerty; it was you won three first prizes last half, wasn't it? A great credit to you, to say nought about the 'good conduct and regular attendance.' Yes, you're like to know all about it, you are."

"Dear me, Gerty," Mrs. Dicki'son would as often as not chime in fretfully, having just wit enough to keep on the blind side of "Father," "eat your tea, and let our Ada Elizabeth alone, do; it isn't pretty of you to be always calling her for something. Our Ada Elizabeth's plain-looking, there's no saying aught again' it, but stupid she isn't, and never was; and, as Father says, ''andsome is as 'andsome does'; so don't let me hear any more of it."

And all the time the poor little subject of discussion would sit writhing upon her chair, feeling that, after all, Gerty was quite right, and that she was not only unfortunately plain to look at, but that, in spite of the handsome prizes laid out in state on the top of the chest of drawers, there was little doubt that she was just too stupid to live.

CHAPTER III