so bold as to ask what you have been crying
about."

When you come to my age, you will find
sitting down on the slope of a beach a much
longer job than you think it now. By the time
I was settled, Rosanna had dried her own eyes
with a very inferior handkerchief to mine—
cheap cambric. She looked very quiet, and
very wretched; but she sat down by me like
a good girl, when I told her. When you want
to comfort a woman by the shortest way, take
her on your knee. I thought of this golden
rule. But there! Rosanna wasn't Nancy, and
that's the truth of it!

"Now tell me, my dear," I said, "what are
you crying about?"

"About the years that are gone, Mr.
Betteredge," says Rosanna, quietly. " My past
life still comes back to me sometimes."

"Come, come, my girl," I said, "your past
life is all sponged out. Why can't you forget
it?"

She took me by one of the lappets of my
coat. I am a slovenly old man, and a good
deal of my meat and drink gets splashed about
on my clothes. Sometimes one of the women,
and sometimes another, cleans me of my
grease. The day before, Rosanna had taken
out a spot for me on the lappet of my coat, with
a new composition, warranted to remove
anything. The grease was gone, but there was a
little dull place left on the nap of the cloth
where the grease had been. The girl pointed
to that place and shook her head.

"The stain is taken off," she said. "But
the place shows, Mr. Betteredge—the place
shows!"

A remark which takes a man unawares by
means of his own coat is not an easy remark
to answer. Something in the girl herself,
too, made me particularly sorry for her just
then. She had nice brown eyes, plain as she
was in other ways—and she looked at me
with a sort of respect for my happy old age
and my good character, as things for ever
out of her own reach, which made my heart
heavy for our second housemaid. Not feeling
myself able to comfort her, there was only
one other thing to do. That thing was—to
take her in to dinner.

"Help me up," I said. "You're late for
dinner, Rosanna-- and I have come to fetch
you in."

"You, Mr. Betteredge!" says she.

"They told Nancy to fetch you," I said.
"But I thought you might like your scolding
better, my dear, if it came from me."

Instead of helping me up, the poor thing
stole her hand into mine, and gave it a little
squeeze. She tried hard to keep from crying
again, and succeeded—for which I respected
her. " You're very kind, Mr. Betteredge,"
she said. " I don't want any dinner to-day—
let me bide a little longer here."

"What makes you like to be here?" I asked.
"What is it that brings you everlastingly to
this miserable place?"

"Something draws me to it," says the girl,
making images with her finger in the sand.
"I try to keep away from it, and I can't.
Sometimes," says she, in a low voice, as if she was
frightened at her own fancy, " sometimes, Mr.
Betteredge, I think that my grave is waiting for
me here."

"There's roast mutton and suet-pudding
waiting for you!" says I. " Go in to dinner
directly. This is what comes, Rosanna, of
thinking on an empty stomach!" I spoke
severely, being naturally indignant (at my time
of life) to hear a young woman of five-and-
twenty talking about her latter end!

She didn't seem to hear me: she put her
hand on my shoulder, and kept me where I was,
sitting by her side.

"I think the place has laid a spell on me,"
she said. " I dream of it, night after night; I
think of it when I sit stitching at my work.
You know I am grateful, Mr. Betteredge—you
know I try to deserve your kindness, and my
lady's confidence in me. But I wonder
sometimes whether the life here is too quiet and too
good for such a woman as I am, after all I have
gone through, Mr. Betteredge—after all I have
gone through. It's more lonely to me to be
among the other servants, knowing I am not
what they are, than it is to be here. My lady
doesn't know, the matron at the reformatory
doesn't know, what a dreadful reproach honest
people are in themselves to a woman like me.
Don't scold me, there's a dear good man. I do
my work, don't I? Please not to tell my lady
I am discontented—I am not. My mind's
unquiet sometimes, that's all." She snatched
her hand off my shoulder, and suddenly
pointed down to the quicksand. "Look!" she
said. " Isn't it wonderful? isn't it terrible?
I have seen it dozens of times, and it's always
as new to me as if I had never seen it before!"

I looked where she pointed. The tide was
on the turn, and the horrid sand began to shiver.
The broad brown face of it heaved slowly, and
then dimpled and quivered all over. " Do you
know what it looks like to me?" says Rosanna,
catching me by the shoulder again. " It looks
as if it had hundreds of suffocating people under
it—all struggling to get to the surface, and all
sinking lower and lower in the dreadful deeps!
Throw a stone in, Mr. Betteredge! Throw a
stone in, and let's see the sand suck it down!"

Here was unwholesome talk! Here was
an empty stomach feeding on an unquiet mind!
My answer—a pretty sharp one, in the poor
girl's own interests, I promise you!—was at
my tongue's end, when it was snapped short off
on a sudden by a voice among the sand-hills
shouting for me by my name. " Betteredge!"
cries the voice, " where are you?" "Here!"
I shouted out in return, without a notion in my
mind of who it was. Rosanna started to her
feet, and stood looking towards the voice. I
was just thinking of getting on my own legs
next, when I was staggered by a sudden change
in the girl's face.

Her complexion turned of a beautiful red,