last, promising to let her know if she heard of any situation
either as governess or companion.

Mrs. Goodnough had gone at once with her daughter who had met her at the
wharf, but Jennie's cousin, who lived out of the city, had sent her
husband to the ship, and, as he was porter in one of the large
warehouses, and did not go home till night, Jennie had leisure to attend
to Bessie, whom she saw to the train, and to whom she said at parting:

"Keep yer vail down, honey, for there's spalpeens an' bla'guards
everywhere, and they might be for spakin to ye. Good-by; God bless ye."

CHAPTER X.

BESSIE MEETS HER AUNT.

The accommodation train from New York to Boston was late that day. There
was a detention at Hartford and another at Springfield, so that the
clock on Miss Betsey McPherson's mantel struck seven when she heard the
whistle of the locomotive as the cars stopped at the Allington station.
As Miss Betsey was when we last saw her so she was now--tall, and
angular, and severe, and looking, as she sat in her hard, straight-back
chair, like the very embodiment of the _naked truth_, from the fit of
her dress to the scanty handful of hair, twisted in a knot at the back
of her head.

She had heard of Daisy's death from her brother only a few days before,
and had felt a pang of regret that she had treated her quite so harshly
on the occasion of her visit to her.

"I might, at least, have been civil to her, though it did make me so mad
to see her smirking up into my face, with all those diamonds on her, and
to know that she was even trying to fool young Allen Browne."

And then her thoughts went after Bessie, for whom her brother had asked
help, saying she was left entirely alone in the world, and was, for
aught he knew, a very nice girl.

"It is impossible for me to care for her," he wrote, "and as my wife
paid all the expenses of her sickness in Rome and for bringing the body
home, she will do no more. So it rests with you to care for Bessie, I
should think you would like some young person with you in your old age."

"In my old age!" Miss Betsey repeated to herself, as she sat thinking of
John's letter, "Yes, I suppose it has come to that, for I am in my
sixties, and the boys call me the old woman when I order them out of the
cherry tree, and still I feel almost as young as I did forty years ago
when Charlie died. Oh, Charlie, my life would have been so different
had you lived;" and in the eyes usually so