, evident enough, beside whom we live content, as if the air about them did us good. My godmother’s lively black eye and clear brunette cheek, her warm, prompt hand, her self-reliant mood, her decided bearing, were all beneficial to me as the atmosphere of some salubrious climate. Her son used to call her “the old lady;” it filled me with pleasant wonder to note how the alacrity and power of five-and-twenty still breathed from her and around her.

“I would bring my work here,” she said, as she took from me the emptied teacup, “and sit with you the whole day, if that overbearing John Graham had not put his veto upon such a proceeding. ‘Now, mamma,’ he said, when he went out, ‘take notice, you are not to knock up your goddaughter with gossip,’ and he particularly desired me to keep close to my own quarters, and spare you my fine company. He says, Lucy, he thinks you have had a nervous fever, judging from your look⁠—is that so?”