blessed, my Lord Wrotham's horses were at their
orders three or four times a week, and the sweet child might have the
advantage of them!" As for the idea that Mr. Warrington might have
happened to meet the children on their drive, Aunt Lambert never once
entertained it,--at least spoke of it. I leave anybody who is interested
in the matter to guess whether Mrs. Lambert could by any possibility
have supposed that her daughter and her sweetheart could ever have come
together again. Do women help each other in love perplexities? Do women
scheme, intrigue, make little plans, tell little fibs, provide little
amorous opportunities, hang up the rope-ladder, coax, wheedle, mystify
the guardian or Abigail, and turn their attention away while Strephon
and Chloe are billing and cooing in the twilight, or whisking off in the
postchaise to Gretna Green? My dear young folks, some people there are
of this nature; and some kind souls who have loved tenderly and truly in
their own time, continue ever after to be kindly and tenderly disposed
towards their young successors, when they begin to play the same pretty
game.

Miss Prim doesn't. If she hears of two young persons attached to each
other, it is to snarl at them for fools, or to imagine of them all
conceivable evil. Because she has a hump-back herself, she is for biting
everybody else's. I believe if she saw a pair of turtles cooing in a
wood, she would turn her eyes down, or fling a stone to frighten them;
but I am speaking, you see, young ladies, of your grandmother, Aunt
Lambert, who was one great syllabub of human kindness; and, besides,
about the affair at present under discussion, how am I ever to tell
whether she knew anything regarding it or not?

So, all she says to Theo on her return home is, "My child, the country
air has done you all the good in the world, and I hope you will take
another drive to-morrow, and another, and another, and so on."

"Don't you think, papa, the ride has done the child most wonderful good,
and must not she be made to go out in the air?" Aunt Lambert asks of the
General, when he comes in for supper.

"Yes, sure, if a coach-and-six will do his little Theo good, she shall
have it," Lambert says, "or he will drag the landau up Hampstead Hill
himself, if there are no horses;" and so the good man would have spent,
freely, his guineas, or his breath, or his blood, to give his child
pleasure. He was charmed at his girl's altered countenance; she pick