ight he not
come back yet, after all? Had she not her chest of linen ready for her
humble house-keeping, with store of serviceable huckaback and piles of
neatly folded kerchiefs, wherefrom this one that showed so white against
her black face was taken, for that she knew her eyes would betray her in
"the presence"?

All the first part of the story the old woman told tenderly, and yet
dwelling upon every incident with a loving pleasure. How happy this
young couple had been, what plans and projects of improvement they had
formed, how they lived in each other, always together, so young and
fresh and beautiful as she remembered them in that one early summer when
they walked arm in arm through the wilderness of roses that ran riot in
the garden,--she told of this as loath to leave it and come to the woe
that lay beneath.

She told the whole story;--shall I repeat it? Not now. If, in the
course of relating the incidents I have undertaken to report, _it tells
itself_, perhaps this will be better than to run the risk of producing a
painful impression on some of those susceptible readers whom it would be
ill-advised to disturb or excite, when they rather require to be amused
and soothed. In our pictures of life, we must show the flowering-out of
terrible growths which have their roots deep, deep underground. Just
how far we shall lay bare the unseemly roots themselves is a matter of
discretion and taste, in which none of us are infallible.

The old woman told the whole story of Elsie, of her birth, of her
peculiarities of person and disposition, of the passionate fears and
hopes with which her father had watched the course of her development.
She recounted all her strange ways, from the hour when she first tried
to crawl across the carpet, and her father shrank from her with an
involuntary shudder as she worked her way towards him. With the memory
of Juliet's nurse she told the story of her teething, and how, the woman
to whose breast she had clung dying suddenly about that time, they
had to struggle hard with the child before she would learn the
accomplishment of feeding with a spoon. And so of her fierce plays and
fiercer disputes with that boy who had been her companion, and the whole
scene of the quarrel when she struck him with those sharp white teeth,
frightening her, old Sophy, almost to death; for, as she said, the boy
would have died, if it hadn't been for the old Doctor's galloping over
as fast as he could gallop and