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, and 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's look 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 burning
the places right out of his arm. Then came the story of that other
incident, sufficiently alluded to already, which had produced such
an ecstasy of fright and left such a nightmare of apprehension in the
household. And so the old woman came down to this present time. That boy
she never loved nor trusted was grown to a dark, dangerous-looking man,
and he was under their roof. He wanted to marry our poor Elsie, and
Elsie hated him, and sometimes she would look at him over her shoulder
just as she used to look at that woman she hated; and she, old Sophy,
couldn't sleep for thinking she should hear