ttled, that my nurse presented herself in
my father's library, her face fatter and redder than usual from being
swollen and inflamed by weeping.

"Well?" said my father, looking up pleasantly from his accounts. But
he added hastily, "Why, bless me, Mrs. Bundle, what is the matter?"

"Asking your pardon for troubling you, sir," Nurse Bundle began in a
choky voice, "but as you made no mention of it yourself, sir, your
kindness being what it is, and the young gentleman as good as gone to
school, and me eating the bread of idleness ever since that tutor
come, I wished to know, sir, when you thought of giving me notice."

"Give you notice to do what?" asked my father.

"To leave your service, sir," said Mrs. Bundle, steadily. "There's no
nurse wanted in this establishment now, sir."

My father laid one hand on Mrs. Bundle's shoulder, and with the other
he drew forward a miniature of my mother which always hung on a
standing frame on the writing-table.

"It is like yourself to be so scrupulous," he said; "but you will
never again speak of leaving us, Mrs. Bundle. Please, for her sake,"
added my father, his own voice faltering as he looked towards the
miniature. As for Nurse Bundle, her tears utterly forbade her to get
out a word.

"If you have too much to do," my father went on, "let a young girl be
got to relieve you of any work that troubles you; or, if you very much
wish for a home to yourself, I have no right to refuse that, though I
wish you could be happy under my roof, and I will see about one of
those cottages near the gate. But you will not desert me--and
Reginald--after so many years."

"The day I do leave will be the breaking of my heart," sobbed Nurse
Bundle, "and if there was any ways in which I could be useful--but
take wages for nothing, I could not, sir."

"Mrs. Bundle," said my father, "if your wages were a matter of any
importance to me, if I could not afford even to pay you for your work,
I should still ask you to share my home, with such comforts as I had
to offer, and to help me so far as you could, for the sake of the
past. I must always be under an obligation to you which I can never
repay," added my father, in his rather elaborate style. "And as to
being useful, well, ahem, if you will kindly continue to superintend
and repair my linen and Master Reginald's ----"

"Why, bless your innocence, sir, and meaning no disrespect," said Mrs.
Bundle, "but there ain't no mending in _your_ linen. Ther