Wickam softly. 'Good-night! Your aunt is an
old lady, Miss Berry, and it's what you must have looked for, often.'

This consolatory farewell, Mrs Wickam accompanied with a look of
heartfelt anguish; and being left alone with the two children again, and
becoming conscious that the wind was blowing mournfully, she indulged in
melancholy--that cheapest and most accessible of luxuries--until she was
overpowered by slumber.

Although the niece of Mrs Pipchin did not expect to find that exemplary
dragon prostrate on the hearth-rug when she went downstairs, she was
relieved to find her unusually fractious and severe, and with every
present appearance of intending to live a long time to be a comfort to
all who knew her. Nor had she any symptoms of declining, in the course
of the ensuing week, when the constitutional viands still continued to
disappear in regular succession, notwithstanding that Paul studied her
as attentively as ever, and occupied his usual seat between the black
skirts and the fender, with unwavering constancy.

But as Paul himself was no stronger at the expiration of that time than
he had been on his first arrival, though he looked much healthier in the
face, a little carriage was got for him, in which he could lie at his
ease, with an alphabet and other elementary works of reference, and be
wheeled down to the sea-side. Consistent in his odd tastes, the child
set aside a ruddy-faced lad who was proposed as the drawer of this
carriage, and selected, instead, his grandfather--a weazen, old,
crab-faced man, in a suit of battered oilskin, who had got tough and
stringy from long pickling in salt water, and who smelt like a weedy
sea-beach when the tide is out.

With this notable attendant to pull him along, and Florence always
walking by his side, and the despondent Wickam bringing up the rear, he
went down to the margin of the ocean every day; and there he would sit
or lie in his carriage for hours together: never so distressed as by the
company of children--Florence alone excepted, always.

'Go away, if you please,' he would say to any child who came to bear him
company. Thank you, but I don't want you.'

Some small voice, near his ear, would ask him how he was, perhaps.

'I am very well, I thank you,' he would answer. 'But you had better go
and play, if you please.'

Then he would turn his head, and watch the child away, and say to
Florence, 'We don't want any others, do we? Kiss me, Floy.'

He had e