your
horrid ships, which I can't bear!" cries the Colonel's spouse. "I hope
Rachel Esmond and I shall be better friends. She had a very high spirit
when we were girls at school."

"Had we not best go about the baby-linen, Mrs. Martin Lambert?" here
interposed her wondering husband. Now, Mrs. Lambert, I dare say, thought
there was no matter for wonderment at all, and had remarked some very
pretty lace caps and bibs in Mrs. Bobbinit's toy-shop. And on that
Sunday afternoon, when the discovery was made, and while little Hetty
was lying upon her pillow with feverish cheeks, closed eyes, and a
piteous face, her mother looked at the child with the most perfect ease
of mind, and seemed to be rather pleased than otherwise at Hetty's woe.

The girl was not only unhappy, but enraged with herself for having
published her secret. Perhaps she had not known it until the sudden
emotion acquainted her with her own state of mind; and now the little
maid chose to be as much ashamed as if she had done a wrong, and been
discovered in it. She was indignant with her own weakness, and broke
into transports of wrath against herself. She vowed she never would
forgive herself for submitting to such a humiliation. So the young pard,
wounded by the hunter's dart, chafes with rage in the forest, is angry
with the surprise of the rankling steel in her side, and snarls and
bites at her sister-cubs, and the leopardess, her spotted mother.

Little Hetty tore and gnawed, and growled, so that I should not like to
have been her fraternal cub, or her spotted dam or sire. "What business
has any young woman," she cried out, "to indulge in any such nonsense?
Mamma, I ought to be whipped, and sent to bed. I know perfectly well
that Mr. Warrington does not care a fig about me. I dare say he likes
French actresses and the commonest little milliner-girl in the toy-shop
better than me. And so he ought, and so they are better than me. Why,
what a fool I am to burst out crying like a ninny about nothing, and
because Mr. Wolfe said Harry played cards of a Sunday! I know he is not
clever, like papa. I believe he is stupid--I am certain he is stupid:
but he is not so stupid as I am. Why, of course, I can't marry him.
How am I to go to America, and leave you and Theo? Of course, he likes
somebody else, at America, or at Tunbridge, or at Jericho, or somewhere.
He is a prince in his own country, and can't think of marrying a poor
half-pay officer's daughter, with twopen