nd seeing that you don't make yourself too much of a
by-word, and the day she comes you are to send me back my child."

"It is good of you to let me keep Letty, dear Susie----"

"Dear Susie!"

"But I don't mean to be a by-word, as you call it," continued Anna, the
ghost of a smile lurking in her eyes, "and I don't want an Englishwoman.
What use would she be here? She wouldn't understand if it was a German
by-word that I turned into. I thought about asking the parson how I had
better set about getting a German lady--a grave and sober female,
advanced in years, as Uncle Joachim wrote."

"Oh, Uncle Joachim----" Susie could hardly endure to hear the name. It
was that odious old man who had filled Anna's head with these ideas. To
leave her money was admirable, but to influence a weak girl's mind with
his wishy-washy German philosophy about the better life and such
rubbish, as he evidently had done during those excursions with her, was
conduct so shameful that she found no words strong enough to express her
opinion of it. Everyone would blame her for what had happened, everyone
would jeer at her, and say that the moment an opportunity of escape had
presented itself Anna had seized it, preferring an existence of
loneliness and hardship--any sort of existence--to all the pleasures of
civilised life in Susie's company. Peter would certainly be very angry
with her, and reproach her with not having made Anna happy enough. Happy
enough! The girl had cost her at least three hundred a year, what with
her expensive education and all her clothes since she came out; and if
three hundred good pounds spent on a girl could not make her happy,
she'd like to know what could. And no one--not one of those odious
people in London whom she secretly hated--would have a single word of
censure for Anna. No one ever had. All her vagaries and absurdities
during the last few years when she had been so provoking had been smiled
at, had been, Susie knew, put down to her treatment of her. Treatment of
her, indeed! The thought of these things made Susie writhe. She had been
looking forward to the next season, to having her pretty sister-in-law
with her in the happy mood she had been in since she heard of her good
fortune, and had foreseen nothing but advantages to herself from Anna's
presence in her house--an Anna spending and not being spent upon, and no
doubt to be persuaded to share the expenses of housekeeping. And now she
must go home by herself t