weak, timid voice, on
Fiddy's own concerns. "You said you had seen these fits before, madam?
May I be so bold as to ask, did the sufferer recover?"

There was a moment's silence. "It was my sister, Fiddy: she was much
older than I. She had a complication of diseases, besides being liable
to swoons all her life. My dear, she died, as we must all die when our
time comes; and may we all be as well prepared as was Deb! In the
meantime we are in God's hands. I have been taken with fainting fits
myself, Fiddy, ere now. I think they are in my constitution, but they
are not called out yet, and I believe they will be kept under; as, I
fully trust, country air, and exercise, and early hours, will conquer
yours."

"And you will take great care of yourself, and go into the country
sometimes, dear Mistress Betty," pleaded the girl fondly, forgetting
herself.

Mistress Betty laughed, and turned the conversation, and finally read
her patient to sleep with the Morning Lesson, given softly and
reverently, as good Bishop Ken himself might have done it.

The poor squire was a discomfited, disordered Sir Roger. He could not
cope with this fine woman; and then it came home to him imperatively
that he was precisely in that haggard, unbecoming state of looks and
costume significantly expressed in those days by the powder being out of
a man's hair and his frills rumpled. So he absented himself for an hour,
and returned freshened by a plunge in the river and a puff in his wig.
But, alas! he found that Mistress Betty, without quitting Mistress
Fiddy's bedchamber, and by the mere sleight of hand of tying on a worked
apron with vine clusters and leaves and tendrils all in purple and green
floss silks, pinning a pink bow under her mob-cap, and sticking in her
bosom a bunch of dewy ponceau polyanthuses, had beat him most
completely.

Mistress Fiddy was, as Mistress Betty had predicted, so far
re-established that she could breakfast with the party and talk of
riding home later in the day; though wan yet, like one of those roses
with a faint colour and a fleeting odour in their earliest bud. And
Mistress Betty breakfasted with the Parnells, and was such company as
the little girls had never encountered before; nor, for that matter,
their uncle before them, though he kept his discovery a profound secret.
It was not so pleasant in one sense, and yet in another it made him feel
like a king.

This was Mistress Betty's last day in Bath, and she wa