indignation. The moment I looked at Madame's
face, I remembered my delinquency. O, that
miserable drawing! O, why had Madame
come to pay an afternoon visit, and, above all,
why, O why, had she gone to fetch Aunt Bella's
knitting out of that guilty drawer, and lighted
on my unmistakable performance!

I went silently over to Aunt Bella, and slid
my hand into hers for sheer weakness of spirit.
I verily believe my touch was a sort of comfort
to her at the moment, so confused and troubled
was she at having had to bear the first brunt of
the storm. She only whispered, "Dear Boonie,"
to give me courage. Boonie, I have said before,
was the pet name she used to give me. Then
came Madame's menacing hand slowly from
behind her back, and held my luckless caricature
on high—I suppose to prevent my snatching at
it, and by her frowns, and her cut-and-thrust
questions, and O! by the tremendous bobbing
of that ominous brown bow on her forehead, she
speedily wrenched out of me all my reminiscences
of the scene of the morning, and plainly
showed by the violence of her wrath, that
however hitherto tormented by suspicions of her
son's transgression—and why his admiration
for Miss Davida should have seemed so grave a
sin in the good lady's eyes I cannot to this hour
rightly understand—yet the fatal certainty of
the facts only reached her through my unfortunate
caricature, for which I had to suffer over
and above the present terrors of that dreadful
examination, such an endless series of French
impositions, and such maddening applications of
irregular verbs in the future, as utterly sickened
me of pictorial attempts for a long time.

But these lighter troubles had hardly faded
out, before another event occurred, which
impressed me the more, inasmuch as it placed me
for the first time face to face with death. When
poor Godpapa Vance was so angry with Aunt
Bella ou the evening of his quartet party, for
miscalling his new conchological hobby a
"Pholex," he little dreamed how bitterly those
ill-omened Pholases would yet be revenged on
him for so obstinately poking them out of their
peaceful retirement in the limestone rock. Only
a few months after that quartet party, he
came home one day, hoarse and feverish from a
walk, during which he had spent a long hour in
lounging and probing their holes with his cane
in the teeth of an east wind. The hoarseness
became a bad cold, and the bad cold became a
fatal sickness: a sort of rapid senile consumption
I think the doctors called it.

The real illness seemed to put his visionary
maladies to flight. It appeared, if I may say so, to
satisfy him as to his claims to be called an invalid,
and he grew much less querulous and exacting in
the last weeks of his life. After a few days of
confinement to his bed, he was allowed to get up
again, and even encouraged to potter about the
house, and busy himself with his old employments.
But I think he never cared now to
hunt up his symptoms in "Carver's book,"
perhaps from an inward consciousness of his
condition, though no word of it had fallen
from those about him. Strangely, too, he
seemed to try and persuade himself that his
sufferings, which, after all, were by no means
sharp, were more fanciful than anything else;
he, who in former days would sulk for hours if
his right to a share of some ghastly malady was
disallowed! Nay, in the diary I have spoken of,
and which godpapa kept till a week before his
death, his only mention of his health during
those weeks consisted for the most part of such
remarks as, "Not much to complain of, thank
God;" "a little shortness of breath, but less
cough;" and so forth. Towards the end he
was much tormented by restlessness and want
of sleep; but even then he was marvellously
patient, considering his nervous irritable
temper; and, after a bad night, he would even
allow one of us young ones to sit down on a
stool at his feet and read him into a doze: a
condescension which to us at first seemed hardly
credible, but which we were glad to remember
when he was gone.

And Aunt Bella! Loving, devoted Aunt
Bella! What of her, when she saw "her
beloved" thus gliding away from her, almost
painlessly, but very surely, and with him all the
music and sunshine and life of her life?

Nay, she did not see it, poor darling; for her
blindness had by this time grown so dense that
she could distinguish no feature in that best-
loved face, though she yet saw the outline of
any one standing betwixt her and the light.
She would still sometimes flutter her small
brown fingers—pretty, round, tapering fingers
—close before her eyes, to ascertain if she
could yet discern their motion, and that little she
always saw as long as she lived; but the wasting
and waning of her poor old husband, his weary
sallow look, his shrinking and shrivelling up,
until his very head, small as it always had
been, seemed half its former size, was mercifully
hidden from her. She was always with
him now, for she had grown bolder in her care,
and he more helpless in his weakness; and I am
sure she knew his state by his step, by the tone
of his voice, by his very gentleness with her.
But I think, with that knowledge, and out of
the depth of it, came so strong a conviction
of her having but a short time to stay on earth
without him, that it enabled her, blind as she
was, to be the same ministering angel, even to
his last moment of consciousness, as she had
been through all their married years.

She had a little patient word often on her
lips in that sad time, which sounds very touching
to me now in the remembrance. It was,
"Ah! that blessed hope!" And I remember the
first time I heard her say it—it was but a very
few days before his death—she had left him
sleeping for a moment, and was standing by my
side at the sitting-room window where we had
so often watched for his return together. I,
longing to comfort her, but not knowing what
to say, nor whether I ought to break the silence,
had caught up one of her little hands, and was
kissing and smoothing it as I often did, when
she took her poor dim eyes from those broken