stic plans, to have time for
home-sickness. But when the first arrangements were made--when the
taste and skill of Graeme, and the inexhaustible strength of their new
maid, Nelly Anderson, had changed the dingy house into as bright and
pleasant a place as might well be in a city street, then came the long
days and the weariness. Then came upon Graeme that which Janet had
predicted, when she so earnestly set her face against their going away
from Merleville till the summer was over. Her fictitious strength
failed her. The reaction from all the exertion and excitement of the
winter and spring came upon her now, and she was utterly prostrate. She
did not give up willingly. Indeed, she had no patience with herself in
the miserable state into which she had fallen. She was ashamed and
alarmed at her disinclination to exert herself--at her indifference to
everything; but the exertion she made to overcome the evil only
aggravated it, and soon was quite beyond her power. Her days were
passed in utter helplessness on the sofa. She either denied herself to
their few visitors, or left them to be entertained by Rose. All her
strength and spirits were needed for the evening when her brothers were
at home.

Some attention to household affairs was absolutely necessary, even when
the time came, that for want of something else to do Nelly nodded for
hours in the long afternoons over the knitting of a stocking. For
though Nelly could do whatever could be accomplished by main strength,
the skill necessary for the arrangement of the nicer matters of their
little household was not in her, and Graeme was never left quite at rest
as to the progress of events in her dominions. It was a very fortunate
chance that had cast her lot with theirs soon after their arrival,
Graeme knew and acknowledged; but after the handiness and immaculate
neatness of Hannah Lovejoy, it was tiresome to have nothing to fall back
upon but the help of the untaught Nelly. Her willingness and
kind-heartedness made her, in many respects, invaluable to them; but her
field of action had hitherto been a turnip-field, or a field in which
cows were kept; and though she was, by her own account, "just wonderfu'
at the making of butter," she had not much skill at anything else. If
it would have brought colour to the cheek, or elasticity to the step of
her young mistress, Nelly would gladly have carried her every morning in
her arms to the top of the mountain; but not