aid, "I should have complimented you on the
increased wisdom of your looks. I did not know the shape of your head
was so like papa's."

"Is Aunt Geoffrey come?" asked Fred.

"Yes," said his sister: "but mamma thinks you had better not see her
till to-morrow."

"I wish Uncle Geoffrey was not going," said Fred. "Nobody else has the
least notion of making one tolerably comfortable."

"O, your mamma, Fred!" said Queen Bee.

"O yes, mamma, of course! But then she is getting fagged."

"Mamma says she is quite unhappy to have kept him so long from his work
in London," said Henrietta; "but I do not know what we should have done
without him."

"I do not know what we shall do now," said Fred, in a languid and
doleful tone.

The Queen Bee, thinking this a capital opportunity, spoke with almost
alarmed eagerness, "O yes, Fred, you will get on famously; you will
enjoy having my mamma so much, and you are so much better already, and
Philip Carey manages you so well--"

"Manages!" said Fred; "ay, and I'll tell you how, Queenie; just as the
man managed his mare when he fed her on a straw a day. I believe he
thinks I am a ghool, and can live on a grain of rice. I only wish he
knew himself what starvation is. Look here! you can almost see the fire
through my hand, and if I do but lift up my head, the whole room is in a
merry-go-round. And that is nothing but weakness; there is nothing
else on earth the matter with me, except that I am starved down to the
strength of a midge!"

"Well, but of course he knows," said Busy Bee; "Papa says he has had an
excellent education, and he must know."

"To be sure he does, perfectly well: he is a sharp fellow, and knows how
to keep a patient when he has got one."

"How can you talk such nonsense, Fred? One comfort is, that it is a sign
you are getting well, or you would not have spirits to do it."

"I am talking no nonsense," said Fred, sharply; "I am as serious as
possible."

"But you can't really think that if Philip was capable of acting in such
an atrocious way, that papa would not find it out, and the other doctor
too?"

"What! when that man gets I don't know how many guineas from mamma every
time he comes, do you think that it is for his interest that I should
get well?"

"My dear Fred," interposed his sister, "you are exciting yourself, and
that is so very bad for you."

"I do assure you, Henrietta, you would find it very little exciting to
be shut up in this room with ha