aggressive, but obstinately sullen, which made her and Miss Selina
sometimes not on speaking terms for a week together. But she simply
"sulked;" she never grumbled or was pert; and she did her work just
as usual--with a kind of dogged struggle not only against the
superior powers but against something within herself much harder to
fight with.

"She makes me feel more sorry for her than angry with her," Miss Leaf
would sometimes say, coming out of the kitchen with that grieved
face, which was the chief sign of displeasure her sweet nature ever
betrayed. "She will have up-hill work through life, like us all, and
more than many of us, poor child!"

But gradually Elizabeth, too, copying involuntarily the rest of the
family, learned to put up with Miss Selina; who, on her part, kept a
sort of armed neutrality. And once, when a short but sharp illness of
Johanna's shook the house from its even tenor, startled every body
out of their little tempers, and made them cling together and work
together in a sort of fear-stricken union against one common grief,
Selina allowed that they might have gone farther and fared worse on
the day they engaged Elizabeth.

After this illness of his Aunt. Ascott came home. It was his first
visit since he had gone to London: Mr. Ascott, he said, objected to
holidays. But now, from some unexplained feeling, Johanna in her
convalescence longed after the boy--no longer a boy, however, but
nearly twenty, and looking fully his age. How proud his aunts were to
march him up the town, and hear every body's congratulations on his
good looks and polished manners! It was the old story--old as the
hills! I do not pretend to invent any thing new. Women, especially