gentleness of her spirit had immensely helped the preparation. Nanda,
beside her, was a Northern savage, and the reason was partly that the
elements of that young lady's nature were already, were publicly, were
almost indecorously active. They were practically there for good or for
ill; experience was still to come and what they might work out to still
a mystery; but the sum would get itself done with the figures now on the
slate. On little Aggie's slate the figures were yet to be written; which
sufficiently accounted for the difference of the two surfaces. Both
the girls struck him as lambs with the great shambles of life in
their future; but while one, with its neck in a pink ribbon, had no
consciousness but that of being fed from the hand with the small sweet
biscuit of unobjectionable knowledge, the other struggled with instincts
and forebodings, with the suspicion of its doom and the far-borne scent,
in the flowery fields, of blood.

"Oh Nanda, she's my best friend after three or four others."

"After so many?" Mr. Longdon laughed. "Don't you think that's rather a
back seat, as they say, for one's best?"

"A back seat?"--she wondered with a purity!

"If you don't understand," said her companion, "it serves me right, as
your aunt didn't leave me with you to teach you the slang of the day."

"The 'slang'?"--she again spotlessly speculated.

"You've never even heard the expression? I should think that a great
compliment to our time if it weren't that I fear it may have been only
the name that has been kept from you."

The light of ignorance in the child's smile was positively golden. "The
name?" she again echoed.

She understood too little--he gave it up. "And who are all the other
best friends whom poor Nanda comes after?"

"Well, there's my aunt, and Miss Merriman, and Gelsomina, and Dr.
Beltram."

"And who, please, is Miss Merriman?"

"She's my governess, don't you know?--but such a deliciously easy
governess."

"That, I suppose, is because she has such a deliciously easy pupil. And
who is Gelsomina?" Mr. Longdon enquired.

"She's my old nurse--my old maid."

"I see. Well, one must always be kind to old maids. But who's Dr.
Beltram?"

"Oh the most intimate friend of all. We tell him everything."

There was for Mr. Longdon in this, with a slight incertitude, an effect
of drollery. "Your little troubles?"

"Ah they're not always so little! And he takes them all away."

"Always?--on the spot?"