sleepy, and forgets all the rest.

Next day Dolly wakes up crying for her papa. It is not the ship any more. Everything is quite still, and her crib does not rock up and down. 'I sought he would be here,' said poor little Dolly, in a croaking, waking voice, sitting up with crumpled curls and bright warm cheeks. It is not her papa, but Aunt Sarah, who takes her up and kisses her, and tries to comfort her, while the ayah, Nun Comee, who has been lying on the floor, jumps up and dances in her flowing white garment and snaps her black fingers, and George brings three tops to spin all at once. Dolly is interested, and ceases crying and begins to smile and to show all her little white teeth.

Lady Sarah rarely smiled. She used to frown so as not to show what she felt. But Dolly from the first day had seemed to understand her; she was never afraid of her; and she used to jump on her knee and make her welcome to the nursery.

'Is you very pretty?' said little Dolly one day, looking at the grim face with the long nose and pinched lips. 'I think you is a very ugly aunt.' And she smiled up in the ugly aunt's face.

'O Dolly! how naughty!' said Rhoda, who happened to be in Dolly's nursery.

Rhoda was a little waif protégée, of Lady Sarah's. She came from the curate's home close by, and was often sent in to play with Dolly, who would be lonely, her aunt thought, without a companion of her own age; Rhoda was Mr. Morgan's niece, and a timid little thing; she was very much afraid at first of Dolly; so she was of the ayah, with her brown face and earrings and monkey hands; but soon the ayah went back to India with silver pins in her ears, taking back many messages to the poor child-bereft parents, with a pair of Dolly's shoes, as a remembrance, and a couple of dolls for herself as a token of good-will from her young mistress. They were for her brothers, Nun Comee said, but it was supposed that she intended to worship them on her return to her native land.

The ayah being gone, little Rhoda soon ceased to be afraid of Dolly, the kind, merry, helpful little playmate, who remained behind, frisking along the passages and up and down the landing-places of Church House. She was much nicer, Rhoda thought, than her own real cousins the Morgans in Old Street.

As days go by, Dolly's pictures warm and brighten from early spring into summer-time. By degrees they reach above the table and over and beyond the garden roller. They are chiefly of the old garden, whose brick walls seem to enclose sunshine and gaudy flowers all the summer through; of the great Kensington parks, where in due season chestnuts are to be found shining among the leaves and dry grasses; of the pond, where the ducks are flapping and diving; of the house, which was little Rhoda's home. This was the great bare house in Old Street, with plenty of noise, dried herbs, content, children without end, and thick bread-and-butter. There was also cold stalled ox on Sundays at one.

In those days life was a simple matter to the children, their days and their legs lengthened together; they loved, they learned, and they looked for a time that was never to be—when their father and mother should come home and live with them again, and everybody was to be happy. As yet the children thought they were only expecting happiness.

George went to school at Frant, near Tunbridge Wells, and came home for the holidays. Dolly had a governess too, and she used to do her lessons with little Rhoda in the slanting school-room at the top of Church House. The little girls did a great many sums, and learnt some French, and read little Arthur's History of England to everybody's satisfaction.

Kind Lady Sarah wrote careful records of the children's progress to her brother, who had sent them to the faithful old sister at home. He heard of the two growing up with good care and much love in the sunshine that streamed upon the old garden; playing together on the terrace that he remembered so well; pulling up the crocuses and the violets that grew in the shade of the white holly-tree. George was a quaint, clever boy, Sarah wrote; Dolly was not so quick, but happy and obedient, and growing up like a little spring flower among the silent old bricks.

Lady Sarah also kept up a desultory correspondence with Philippa, her sister-in-law. Mrs. Vanborough sent many minute directions about the children; Dolly was to dine off cold meat for her complexion's sake, and she wished her to have her hair crimped; and George was to wear kid-gloves and write a better hand; and she hoped they were very good, and that they sometimes saw their cousin Robert, and wrote to their uncle, Sir Thomas Henley, Henley Court, Smokethwaite, Yorkshire: and she and dear papa often and often longed for their darlings. Then came presents—a spangled dress for Lady Sarah, and silver ornaments for Dolly, and an Indian sword for George, with which he nearly cut off Rhoda's head.

CHAPTER III.

TO OLD STREET BY THE LANES.

In those days, as I have said, the hawthorn spread across the fields and market-gardens that lay between Kensington and the river. Lanes ran to Chelsea, to Fulham, to North End, where Richardson once lived and wrote in his garden-house. The mist of the great city hid the horizon and dulled the sound of the advancing multitudes; but close at hand, all round about the old house, were country corners untouched—blossoms instead of bricks in spring-time, summer shade in summer. There were strawberry-beds, green, white, and crimson in turn. The children used to get many a handful of strawberries from Mr. Penfold, the market-gardener at the end of the lane, and bunches of radish when strawberries were scarce. They gathered them for themselves on a bank where paving-stones and coal-holes are now and a fine growth of respectable modern villas. I believe that in those days there were sheep grazing in Kensington Gore. It is certain that Mr. Penfold kept Alderneys in the field beyond his orchard; and that they used to come and drink in a pond near his cottage. He lived with his wife and his daughter, under an old tiled roof, and with a rose-tree growing on the wall. In the window of the cottage a little card was put up, announcing that "Curds-and-whey were to be had within," and the children sometimes went there to drink the compound out of Emma Penfold's doll's tea-things. The old pond was at the garden-gate: there was a hedge round about it, and alder-trees starting up against the sunset, and the lanes, and orchards beyond. The water reflected the sunset in the sky and the birds flying home to the sound of the evening bells. Sometimes Emma would come out of the cottage, and stand watching the children play. She was a pretty girl, with rosy cheeks and dark soft eyes. It was a quaint old corner, lonely enough in the daytime; but of evenings, people would be passing—labourers from their work, strollers in the fields, neighbours enjoying the air. The cottage must have been as old as Church House itself. It was chiefly remarkable for its beautiful damask rose-trees, of which the red leaves sprinkled the threshold, across which pretty Emma Penfold would step. I think it was for the sake of the rose-tree that people sometimes stopped and asked for curds-and-whey. Emma would dispense the horrible mixture, blushing beneath her basket-work plaits.

Sometimes in May mornings the children would gather hawthorn branches out of the lanes, and make what they liked to call garlands for themselves. The white blossoms looked pretty in Rhoda's dark hair; and Mademoiselle coming to give them their music-lesson, would find the