found
him a happy, bright child, full of engaging ways and innocent sayings,
and quite satisfied with 'Cousin Honor,' but bed-time always brought back
the same wailing. Nurse, a tidy, brisk personage, with a sensible,
deferential tone to her superiors, and a caressing one to the children,
tried in vain assurances of papa's soon coming back; nay, it might be
feared that she held out that going to sleep would bring the morrow when
he was to come; but even this delusive promise failed; the present was
all; and Cousin Honor herself was only not daddy, though she nursed him,
and rocked him in her arms, and fondled him, and told stories or sung his
lullaby with nightly tenderness, till the last sobs had quivered into the
smooth heavings of sleep.

Might only sea air and exercise act as a soporific! That was a better
chance than the new promise which Honora was vexed to find nurse holding
out to poor little Owen, that if he would be a good boy, he was going to
papa. She was puzzled how to act towards a person not exactly under her
authority, but she took courage to speak about these false promises, and
found the remonstrance received in good part; indeed nurse used to talk
at much length of the children in a manner that implied great affection
for them, coupled with a sense that it would be an excellent thing for
them to be in such judicious hands. Honor always came away from nurse in
good humour with herself.

The locality she had chosen was a sheltered village on the north coast of
Somerset, just where Exmoor began to give grandeur to the outline in the
rear, and in front the Welsh hills wore different tints of purple or
gray, according to the promise of weather, Lundy Isle and the two lesser
ones serving as the most prominent objects, as they rose from--Well,
well! Honor counted herself as a Somersetshire woman, and could not brook
hearing much about the hue of the Bristol Channel. At any rate, just
here it had been so kind as to wash up a small strip of pure white sand,
fit for any amount of digging for her children; and though Sandbeach was
watering-place enough to have the lodging-houses, butchers and bakers, so
indispensable to the London mind, it was not so much in vogue as to be
overrun by fine ladies, spoiling the children by admiring their beauty.
So said Miss Charlecote in her prudence--but was not she just as jealous
as nurse that people should turn round a second time to look at those
lovely little faces?