ve
seen them. No, I don't mean that they have been to see me. You'll
bring them some day, won't you? I'm sure Ambrose's boy would come to
see a sick woman. I watched one of them yesterday pick up old Molly's
oranges for her in the street, when her basket got upset by a cart, and
he then paid her for them, and gave them among the children round. It
did my heart good, I'd not seen such a sight since the boys were sent
away."

"Harold would do anything kind," I said, "or to see an old friend of
his father. The worst of it is that there seem to be so few who wish
to see him, or can even forgive me for staying with him."

I showed her Lord Erymanth's letter, and told her of the others, asking
her what it meant. "Oh, as to Lady Diana," she said, "there is no
doubt about that. She was greatly offended at your having sent away
her carriage and not having taken her advice, and she goes about saying
she is disappointed in you."

For my mother's sake, and my little Viola, and Auld Lang Syne besides,
I was much hurt, and defended myself in a tone of pique which made Miss
Woolmer smile and say she was far from blaming me, but that she thought
I ought to count the cost of my remaining at Arghouse. And then she
told me that the whole county was up in arms against the new comers,
not only from old association of their name with revolutionary notions,
but because the old Miss Stympsons, of Lake Side, who had connections
in New South Wales, had set it abroad that the poor boys were ruffians,
companions of the double-dyed villain Prometesky, and that Harold in
especial was a marked man, who had caused the death of his own wife in
a frenzy of intoxication.

At this I fairly laughed. Harold, at his age, who never touched
liquor, and had lived a sort of hermit life in the Bush, to be saddled
with a wife only to have destroyed her! The story contradicted itself
by its own absurdity; and those two Miss Stympsons were well-known
scandal-mongers. Miss Woolmer never believed a story of theirs without
sifting, but she had been in a manner commissioned to let me know that
society was determined not to accept Eustace and Harold Alison, and was
irate at my doing so. Mothers declared that they should be very sorry
to give poor Lucy Alison up, but that they could not have their
children brought into contact with young men little better than
convicts, and whom they would, besides, call my cousins, instead of my
nephews. "I began to susp