Why have you
put away my Bible and the other good books?'

"'Because your aunts and the doctors say you read them till you have
made yourself quite melancholy, Miss Vaughan; and so they have been
taken away, but not by me. I have not got them. You must not blame me
for what others have done; you know my foolish fondness, and that I can
deny you nothing in my power to grant.'

"We had two or three conversations of this kind; but Harris watched us
so closely, that Miss Vaughan never had an opportunity of talking to me
by ourselves; so that we never renewed, during those holidays, the
subjects we had sometimes talked of at the Abbey.

"I stayed at that time about six weeks with Miss Vaughan; and as she
appeared to be much better and more cheerful, I was sent back to
school, with a promise from my governesses that, if Miss Vaughan
desired it, I was to go to her again at the shortest notice.

"The spring that year was early, and some of the days in March were so
fine, that the Mistresses Vaughan presumed to take their niece out in
the coach without medical advice. Deeply and long did the old ladies
lament their imprudence; but probably this affliction was the first
which ever really caused them to feel.

"About six days after the last of these airings, the coach came to the
school, bringing a request that I should be sent back in it instantly.

"Miss Vaughan had been seized with a violent inflammation in the chest,
attended with dreadful spasms. She had called for poor dear Mary, as if
Mary could help her; and I was told that she was in a dying state. I
sobbed and cried the whole way, for where were the delights then to me
of a coach-and-four? I was taken immediately up to her bedroom, for she
had called again for poor dear Mary. But, oh, how shocked was I when I
approached the bed! Fanny was sitting at the pillow, holding her up in
her arms: she was as pale as death itself; her eyes were closed, her
fair hands lay extended on the counterpane, her auburn ringlets hanging
in disorder. She was enjoying a short slumber after the fatigue of
acute pain, for she then breathed easily. Near the bed stood Harris,
with the look of a person at once distressed and offended. Miss Vaughan
had preferred, in her anguish, to be held by Fanny rather than by her.
She had often suspected Evelyn of not liking her, and the truth had
come out that morning during her sufferings.

"In the next room I could see the figures of the four Mistres