under care of the guard, and is to be met by the same carriage."

I forthwith expressed that the proper as well as the pleasant and
friendly thing would be therefore that on the arrival of the public
conveyance I should be in waiting for him with his little sister;
an idea in which Mrs. Grose concurred so heartily that I somehow
took her manner as a kind of comforting pledge--never falsified,
thank heaven!--that we should on every question be quite at one.
Oh, she was glad I was there!

What I felt the next day was, I suppose, nothing that could
be fairly called a reaction from the cheer of my arrival;
it was probably at the most only a slight oppression produced
by a fuller measure of the scale, as I walked round them,
gazed up at them, took them in, of my new circumstances.
They had, as it were, an extent and mass for which I had not
been prepared and in the presence of which I found myself,
freshly, a little scared as well as a little proud.
Lessons, in this agitation, certainly suffered some delay;
I reflected that my first duty was, by the gentlest arts I
could contrive, to win the child into the sense of knowing me.
I spent the day with her out-of-doors; I arranged with her,
to her great satisfaction, that it should be she, she only,
who might show me the place. She showed it step by step
and room by room and secret by secret, with droll, delightful,
childish talk about it and with the result, in half an hour,
of our becoming immense friends. Young as she was, I was struck,
throughout our little tour, with her confidence and courage
with the way, in empty chambers and dull corridors, on crooked
staircases that made me pause and even on the summit of an old