guard against self-deception or mistake. One or two of her
neighbours when the exercises were over, came and took her hand, with a
warm simple expression of feeling which made Eleanor's heart hot; and
then she rode home.

"Did you have a pleasant time?" said her aunt.

"Aunt Caxton, I think that room where we meet is the pleasantest place
in the world!"

"What do you think of the chapel at Glanog?"

"I don't know. I believe that is as good or better."

"Are you too tired to go out again?"

"Not at all. Who wants me?"

"Nanny Croghan is very sick. I have been with her all the afternoon;
and Jane is going to sit up with her to-night; but Jane cannot go yet."

"She need not. I will stay there myself. I like it, aunt Caxton."

"Then I will send for you early in the morning."

Nanny Croghan lived a mile or two from the farmhouse. Eleanor walked
there, attended by John with a basket. The place was a narrow dell
between two uprising hills covered with heather; as wild and secluded
as it is possible to imagine. The poor woman who lived there alone was
dying of lingering disease. John delivered the basket, and left Eleanor
alone with her charge and the mountains.

It was not a night like that she had spent by the bedside of her old
nurse's daughter. Nanny was dying fast; and she needed something done
for her constantly. Through all the hours of the darkness Eleanor was
kept on the watch or actively employed, in administering medicine, or
food, or comfort. For when Nanny wanted nothing else, she wanted that.

"Tell me something I can fix my mind onto," she would say. "It seems
slipping away from me, like. And then I gets cold with fear."

Eleanor was new at the business; she had forgotten to bring her Bible
with her, and she could find none in the house; "her sister had been
there," Nanny said, "and had carried it away." Eleanor was obliged to
draw on the slender stores of her memory; and to make the most of
those, she was obliged to explain them to Nanny, and go them over and
over, and pick them to pieces, and make her rest upon each clause and
almost each word of a verse. There were some words that surely Eleanor
became well acquainted with that night. For Nanny could sleep very
little, and when she could not sleep she wanted talking incessantly.
Eleanor urged her to accept the promises and she would have the peace.
"The secret of the Lord is with them that fear him."

"Ay, but I never did fear him, you see,--t