her again, to verify my old notion.

Of Lady Anne Mowbray, who at the time I had been at the Priory, was a
little child, some years younger than myself, I could recollect nothing,
except that she wore a pink sash, of which she was very vain, and that she
had been ushered into the drawing-room after dinner by Mrs. Fowler, at the
sight of whom my inmost soul had recoiled. I remember, indeed, pitying her
little ladyship for being under such dominion, and longing to ask her
whether Fowler had told her the story of Simon the Jew. But I could never
commune with Lady Anne; for either she was up in the nursery, or Fowler was
at her back in the drawing-room, or little Lady Anne was sitting upright on
her stool at her mother's feet, whom I did not care to approach, and in
whose presence I seldom ventured to speak--consequently my curiosity on
this point had, from that hour, slumbered within me; but it now wakened,
upon my mother's proposing to present me to Lady Anne, and the pleasure of
asking and the hope of obtaining an answer to my long-meditated question,
was the chief gratification I promised myself from the renewal of our
acquaintance with her ladyship.



CHAPTER VI.

My recollection of Lady de Brantefield proved wonderfully correct; she
gave me back the image I had in my mind--a stiff, haughty-looking picture
of a faded old beauty. Adhering religiously to the fashion of the times
when she had been worshipped, she made it a point to wear the old
head-dress exactly. She was in black, in a hoop of vast circumference, and
she looked and moved as if her being Countess de Brantefield in her own
right, and concentring in her person five baronies, ought to be for ever