cruel, almost
profane, and yet which would not be dismissed, and made her heart leap
with strange bounds at the wild thought, 'Could it be true?' then sink
again with shame at her own presumptuous folly in entertaining such a
thought for a moment.

Yet whenever she actually encountered Mr. Dutton her habitual comfort
and reliance on him revived, and dispelled all the embarrassment which
at other times she expected to feel in his presence.

CHAPTER XXXI.

SPES NON FRACTA.

Summer had quite set in before Mr. Egremont was able to go out for a
drive, and then he was ordered to Buxton.

Nuttie only once saw her cousins before leaving town, for their little
boy fulfilled the nursery superstition by whooping till May; and all
intercourse was prohibited, till he had ceased for a whole week to
utter a suspicious sound. Mr. Dutton had insisted on the family
spending a fortnight at Springfield House for change of air, and it was
there that Nuttie was permitted to see them, though the children were
still forbidden to meet.

Annaple looked very thin, but rattled as merrily as ever. 'No one
could guess,' she said, 'what a delight it was not to know what one was
to have for dinner?'

'To do more than know, I am afraid,' said Ursula.

'Well, next to the delight of knowing nothing at all about it--and even
that is only good for a holiday--is the delight of seeing a pudding
come out smooth and comfortable and unbroken from its basin. "Something
attempted, something done," you know. It is quite as good a work of
art as a water-coloured drawing.'

'Only not quite so permanent.'

'No; it is only one's first pudding that one wants to embalm in a glass
case for being so good as not to leave its better part behind in the
basin, or to collapse as soon as it is in the dish.'

'Which my puddings always did in the happy days of old, but then I was
always hunted ignominiously out of the kitchen and told I wasted good
food,' said Nuttie.

'Yes, and waste is fearful when Mark and Billy have to eat it all the
same, like the poor cows with spoilt hay. I wonder whether your old
experiences recall the joy of finding trustworthy eggs within your
price.'

'Ah, I was not housekeeper. I only remember being in disgrace for
grumbling when there was no pudding, because the hens would not lay.'

'Though I heard a woman declaring the other day that there ought to be
a machine for them. Oh, the scenes that I encounter when I am
m