have George fetched
down to them--old aunts, who wanted the whole story of the child's
illness, and came imagining there was something to be hushed up; Lady
Leonora extremely polite, but extremely disgusted at the encounter with
them; George ready to be persuaded to take every one up to see his wife,
and the prohibition to be made by Dr. May over and over again--it was
a most tedious, wearing afternoon, and at last, when the visitors had
gone, and George had hurried back to his wife, Dr. May threw himself
into an arm-chair and said, "Oh, Meta, sorrow weighs more heavily in
town than in the country!"

"Yes!" said Meta. "If one only could go out and look at the flowers, and
take poor Flora up a nosegay!"

"I don't think it would make much difference to her," sighed the doctor.

"Yes, I think it would," said Meta; "it did to me. The sights there
speak of the better sights."

"The power to look must come from within," said Dr. May, thinking of his
poor daughter.

"Ay," said Meta, "as Mr. Ernescliffe said, 'heaven is as near--!' But
the skirts of heaven are more easily traced in our mountain view than
here, where, if I looked out of window, I should only see that giddy
string of carriages and people pursuing each other!"

"Well, we shall get her home as soon as she is able to move, and I hope
it may soothe her. What a turmoil it is! There has not been one moment
without noise in the twenty-two hours I have been here!"

"What would you say if you were in the city?"

"Ah! there's no talking of it; but if I had been a fashionable London
physician, as my father-in-law wanted to make me, I should have been
dead long ago!"

"No, I think you would have liked it very much."

"Why?"

"Love's a flower that will not die," repeated Meta, half smiling. "You
would have found so much good to do--"

"And so much misery to rend one's heart," said Dr. May. "But, after all,
I suppose there is only a certain capacity of feeling."

"It is within, not without, as you said," returned Meta.

"Ha, there's another!" cried Dr. May, almost petulant at the sound
of the bell again, breaking into the conversation that was a great
refreshment.

"It was Sir Henry Walkinghame's ring," said Meta. "It is always his time
of day."

The doctor did not like it the better.

Sir Henry sent up a message to ask whether he could see Mr. or Miss
Rivers.

"I suppose we must," said Meta, looking at the doctor. "Lady Walkinghame
must be anxious abo