contrivance, whose doors had never been opened; a number of expensive
dolls, which had never been disrobed. Nancy approached these
joys--diffidently and with caution. She rode upon the horse, opened the
doll's-house, embraced the dolls, but she had no natural imagination to
bestow upon them, and the horse and the dolls, hurt, perhaps, at their
long neglect, received her with frigidity. Those grubby little children
in the Square would, she knew, have been "there" in a moment. She began
then to be frightened. The nursery, her bedroom, the dark little passage
outside, were suddenly alarming. Sometimes, when she was sitting quietly
in her nursery, the house was so silent that she could have screamed.

"I don't think Miss Nancy's quite well, ma'am," said the nurse.

"Oh, dear! What a nuisance," said Mrs. Ross who liked her little girl to
be always well and beautiful. "I do hope she's not going to catch
something."

"She doesn't take that pleasure in her clothes she did," said the nurse.

"Perhaps she wants some new ones," said her mother. "Take her to
Florice, nurse." Nancy went to Florice, and beautiful new garments were
invented, and once again she was squeezed, and tightened, and stretched,
and pulled. But Nancy was indifferent. As they tried these clothes, and
stood back, and stepped forward, and admired and criticised, she was
thinking, "I wish the nursery clock didn't make such a noise."

Her little bedroom next to nurse's large one was a beautiful affair,
with red roses up and down the wall-paper and in and out of the crockery
and round and round the carpet. Her bed was magnificent, with lace and
more roses, and there was a fine photograph of her beautiful mother in a