Lois stepped along lightly.

She did not look like the same girl of three months ago.

It was strange that in spite of all her terrible distress of mind and hard struggles since she came to Elliot it should have been so, but it was.

Every life has its own conditions, although some are poisons.

Whether it had been as Mrs.Babcock thought, that the girl had been afflicted with no real malady, only the languor of the spring, intensified and fostered in some subtle fashion by her mother's anxiety, or whether it had been the purer air of Elliot that had brought about the change, to whatever it might have been due, she was certainly better.
Lois had on an old pink muslin dress that she had worn many a summer, indeed the tucks had been let down to accord with her growth, and showed in bars of brighter pink around the skirt.