been clasped in strong arms which held her in a particularly firm and gentle and agreeable way. She had no recollection at all of her mother, who had run off when Fidelia was an infant; and Fidelia never was told more of her mother than that fact; nor was she ever shown a picture of her mother.
"I destroyed them all long ago," aunt Minna announced, as of a good act well performed; but she added, "You are exactly like your mother. Your nose is precisely hers and your skin; and your hair is the identical color."
When she was a child, Fidelia used to look at herself in a glass from every angle in endeavor to learn what was so especially wrong with her nose; but after a time, she came to understand that her trouble was that she was pretty and her nose was particularly tantalizing to some women; and her clear, soft, white and pink skin annoyed them and, more and more as she grew older, they seemed to resent the color and luxuriance of her hair which was red of deep, rich auburn hue.
Since Mr. Jessop, of the Drovers' Bank, allowed no attractive profit for boarding Fidelia, aunt Minna sent her away to school at the earliest age at which Miss Sumpter, in Des Moines, would take a girl. Fidelia found that school a pleasant, friendly place where she got into very little trouble; and she came to love the school so that she intentionally failed in her work, in her last year, for fear of having to return "home." But aunt Minna had no idea of keeping her about merely from affection; so Fidelia went next to Mrs. Drummond's school in St. Paul and was there
