"Magnificent!" said Turner; "but mind, you must do nothing out of bravado.
That won't do at all."

"I have done," said Connie, putting on a face of mock submission.

That day we carried her out for a few minutes, but hardly laid her down,
for we were afraid of the damp from the earth. A few feet nearer or farther
from the soil will make a difference. It was the last time for many weeks.
Anyone interested in my Connie need not be alarmed: it was only because of
the weather, not because of her health.

One day I was walking home from a visit I had been paying to Mrs. Stokes.
She was much better, in a fair way to recover indeed, and her mental health
was improved as well. Her manner to me was certainly very different, and
the tone of her voice, when she spoke to her husband especially, was
changed: a certain roughness in it was much modified, and I had good
hopes that she had begun to climb up instead of sliding down the hill of
difficulty, as she had been doing hitherto.

It was a cold and gusty afternoon. The sky eastward and overhead was
tolerably clear when I set out from home; but when I left the cottage to
return, I could see that some change was at hand. Shaggy vapours of light
gray were blowing rapidly across the sky from the west. A wind was blowing
fiercely up there, although the gusts down below came from the east.
The clouds it swept along with it were formless, with loose
fringes--disreputable, troubled, hasty clouds they were, looking like
mischief. They reminded me of Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind," in which
he compares the "loose clouds" to hair, and calls them "the locks of the
approaching storm." Away to the west, a great thick curtain of fog, of a
luminous yellow, covered all the sea-horizon, extending north and south as