ad end to come.

"The night ere I left home for the Court," pursued the old lady, "my
mother held long converse with me. `Thou art mightily improved, Dolly,'
saith she, `since thy coming to London; but there is yet a stiff
soberness about thee, that thou wilt do well to be rid of. Thou
shouldst have more ease, child. Do but look at thy cousin Jenny, that
is three years younger than thou, and yet how will she rattle to every
man that hath a word of compliment to pay her!' But after she had made
an end, my father called me into his closet. `Poor Dorothy!' he said.
`The bloom is not all off the peach yet. But 'tis going, child--'tis
fast going. I feared this. Poor Dorothy!'"

"Oh, dear!" said Rhoda. "You were not going to a funeral, Mrs Dolly!"

"Ah, child! maybe, if I had, it had been the better for me. The wise
man saith, `It is better to go to the house of mourning than to the
house of feasting.'"

"But pray, what harm came to you, Mrs Dorothy?"

"No outward bodily harm at all, my dear. Yet even that was no thanks to
me. It was `of the Lord's compassion,' seeing He had a purpose of mercy
toward me. But, ah me! what inward and spiritual harm! Mrs Rhoda, my
dear, I saw sights and heard sayings those two years I dwelt in the
Court which I would give the world, so to speak, only to forget them
now."

"What were they, Mrs Dorothy?" asked Rhoda, eagerly sitting up.

"Think you I am likely to tell you, child? No, indeed!"

"But what sort of harm did they to you, Mrs Dolly?"

"Child, I learned to think lightly of sin. People did not talk of sin
there at all; the words they used were crime and vice. Every wrong
doing was looked on as it affected other men: if it touched your
neighbour's purse or person, it was ill; if it only grieved his heart,
then 'twas a little matter. But how it touched God was never so much as
thought on. There might have been no God in Heaven, so little account
was taken of Him there."

"Now do tell us. Mrs Dolly, what the Queen was like, and the King,"
said Rhoda, yawning. "And how many Maids of Honour were there? Just
tell us all about it."

"There were six," replied the old lady, taking up her knitting, which
she had dropped in her earnestness a minute before. "And Mrs Sanderson
was their mother. I reckon you will scarce know that always a married
gentlewoman goeth about with these young damsels, called the Mother of
the Maids, whose work it is to see after them."