bed-clothes if there’s a peal o’ thunder, how will she face ghosts ten feet high, with eyes like carriage-lamps?” cried the cook.

Susan looked annoyed and almost angry at hearing her mistress spoken of thus. “Miss Emmie is nervous and not very strong, so she is easily startled,” said the maid; “but she is as good a Christian as lives, and will not, I hope, give way to any idle fancies and fears such as trouble folk who are afraid of their own shadows. I should not, however, wonder if she find Myst Court very dull.”

“She’d better take to amusing herself by looking after the poor folk around her,” observed the cook. “From what you’ve told us, John, I take it there’s company enough of bare-legged brats and ragged babies.”

“Miss Emmie is mighty afraid of infection,” said John, doubtfully shaking his head. “She has never let me call a four-wheeler for her in London since small-pox has been going about. Miss will cross to the other side of the road if she sees a child with a spot on its face. No, no; she’ll never venture to set so much as her foot in one of them dirty hovels that I saw down there in Wiltshire.”

“’Tain’t fit as she should,” observed Ann. “Why should ladies demean themselves by going amongst dirty beggarly folk?”

“To help them out of their misery,” said Susan. “In the place where I lived before I came here, I saw my mistress, and the young ladies besides, take delight in visiting the poor. They thought that it no more demeaned them to enter a cottage than to enter a church; the rich and the poor meet together in both.”

“Miss Emmie is too good to be proud,” observed John; “but, take my word for it, she’ll never muster up courage to go within ten yards of a cottage. Kind things she’ll say, ay, and do; for she has the kindest heart in the world. But she’ll send you, Susan, with her baskets of groceries and bundles of cast-off clothes; she’ll not hunt up cases herself. Miss would shrink from bad smells; she’d faint at the sight of a sore. She’ll not dirty her fine muslin dresses, or run the risk of catching fevers, or may be the plague, by visiting the poor.”

“Time will show,” observed Susan. But from her knowledge of the disposition of her young lady, the faithful attendant was not without her misgivings upon the subject.

CHAPTER IV.
PREPARING TO START.