and I'll give you a dose of physic. That's a well-meaning lad, if you
only let him alone," continued Miss Garth, in soliloquy, when Thomas had
retired; "but he's not strong enough for concerts twenty miles off. They
wanted _me_ to go with them last night. Yes: catch me!"

Nine o'clock struck; and the minute-hand stole on to twenty minutes past
the hour, before any more footsteps were heard on the stairs. At the
end of that time, two ladies appeared, descending to the breakfast-room
together--Mrs. Vanstone and her eldest daughter.

If the personal attractions of Mrs. Vanstone, at an earlier period of
life, had depended solely on her native English charms of complexion and
freshness, she must have long since lost the last relics of her fairer
self. But her beauty as a young woman had passed beyond the average
national limits; and she still preserved the advantage of her more
exceptional personal gifts. Although she was now in her forty-fourth
year; although she had been tried, in bygone times, by the premature
loss of more than one of her children, and by long attacks of illness
which had followed those bereavements of former years--she still
preserved the fair proportion and subtle delicacy of feature, once
associated with the all-adorning brightness and freshness of beauty,
which had left her never to return. Her eldest child, now descending the
stairs by her side, was the mirror in which she could look back and
see again the reflection of her own youth. There, folded thick on the
daughter's head, lay the massive dark hair, which, on the mother's, was
fast turning gray. There, in the daughter's cheek, glowed the lovely
dusky red which had faded from the mother's to bloom again no more. Miss
Vanstone had already reached the first maturity of womanhood; she had
completed her six-and-twentieth year. Inheriting the dark majestic
character of her mother's beauty, she had yet hardly inherited all its