th her
agility and her light, childish heart, still considered it proper to
scold every time I caught her at such an elevation, but so that she knew
there was no necessity for descending. From dinner to tea she would lie
in her breeze-rocked cradle, doing nothing except singing old songs--my
nursery lore--to herself, or watching the birds, joint tenants, feed and
entice their young ones to fly: or nestling with closed lids, half
thinking, half dreaming, happier than words can express.

'Look, Miss!' I exclaimed, pointing to a nook under the roots of one
twisted tree. 'Winter is not here yet. There's a little flower up
yonder, the last bud from the multitude of bluebells that clouded those
turf steps in July with a lilac mist. Will you clamber up, and pluck it
to show to papa?' Cathy stared a long time at the lonely blossom
trembling in its earthy shelter, and replied, at length--'No, I'll not
touch it: but it looks melancholy, does it not, Ellen?'

'Yes,' I observed, 'about as starved and suckless as you: your cheeks are
bloodless; let us take hold of hands and run. You're so low, I daresay I
shall keep up with you.'

'No,' she repeated, and continued sauntering on, pausing at intervals to
muse over a bit of moss, or a tuft of blanched grass, or a fungus
spreading its bright orange among the heaps of brown foliage; and, ever
and anon, her hand was lifted to her averted face.

'Catherine, why are you crying, love?' I asked, approaching and putting
my arm over her shoulder. 'You mustn't cry because papa has a cold; be
thankful it is nothing worse.'

She now put no further restraint on her tears; her breath was stifled by
sobs.

'Oh, it will be something worse,' she said. 'And what shall I do when
papa and you leave me, and I am by myself? I can't forget your words,
Ellen; they are always in my ear. How life will be changed, how dreary
the world will be, when papa and you are dead.'

'None can tell whether you won't die before us,' I replied. 'It's wrong
to anticipate evil. We'll hope there are years and years to come before
any of us go: master is young, and I am strong, and hardly forty-five. My
mother lived till eighty, a canty dame to the last. And suppose Mr.
Linton were spared till he saw sixty, that would be more years than you
have counted, Miss. And would it not be foolish to mourn a calamity
above twenty years beforehand?'

'But Aunt Isabella was younger than papa,' she remarked, gazing up