enough to be...?"

"I know--I know! but what is that to me? Hasn't your br...--well, never
mind who, some of 'em-told me stories against you, and didn't they show
me the Family Bible, where all your names are down, and the dates of
your birth?"

"The cowards! Who did that?" cried out Lady Maria. "Dear Harry, tell me
who did that? Was it my mother-in-law, the grasping, odious, abandoned,
brazen harpy? Do you know all about her? How she married my father in
his cups--the horrid hussey!--and..."

"Indeed it wasn't Lady Castlewood," interposed the wondering Harry.

"Then it was my aunt," continued the infuriate lady. "A pretty moralist,
indeed! A bishop's widow, forsooth, and I should like to know whose
widow before and afterwards. Why, Harry, she intrigue: with the
Pretender, and with the Court of Hanover, and, I dare say, would with
the Court of Rome and the Sultan of Turkey if she had had the means. Do
you know who her second husband was? A creature who..."

"But our aunt never spoke a word against you," broke in Harry, more and
more amazed at the nymph's vehemence.

She checked her anger. In the inquisitive countenance opposite to
her she thought she read some alarm as to the temper which she was
exhibiting.

"Well, well! I am a fool," she said. "I want thee to think well of me,
Harry!"

A hand is somehow put out and seized and, no doubt, kissed by the
rapturous youth. "Angel!" he cries, looking into her face with his
eager, honest eyes.

Two fish-pools irradiated by a pair of stars would not kindle to greater
warmth than did those elderly orbs into which Harry poured his gaze.
Nevertheless, he plunged into their blue depths, and fancied he saw
heaven in their calm brightness. So that silly dog (of whom Aesop or the
Spelling-book used to tell us in youth) beheld a beef-bone in the pond,
and snapped at it, and lost the beef-bone he was carrying. O absurd cur!
He saw the beefbone in his own mouth reflected in the treacherous pool,
which dimpled, I dare say, with ever so many smiles, coolly sucked up
the meat, and returned to its usual placidity. Ah! what a heap of wreck
lie beneath some of those quiet surfaces! What treasures we have dropped
into them! What chased golden dishes, what precious jewels of love, what
bones after bones, and sweetest heart's flesh! Do not some very faithful
and unlucky dogs jump in bodily, when they are swallowed up heads and
tails entirely? When some women come to be dragged, it is