some minutes.

'It's a Baby, Sir,' said the Major, shutting up the glass again, 'for
fifty thousand pounds!'

The Major couldn't forget it. He could do nothing but whistle, and stare
to that extent, that his eyes, compared with what they now became, had
been in former times quite cavernous and sunken. Day after day, two,
three, four times a week, this Baby reappeared. The Major continued to
stare and whistle. To all other intents and purposes he was alone in
Princess's Place. Miss Tox had ceased to mind what he did. He might have
been black as well as blue, and it would have been of no consequence to
her.

The perseverance with which she walked out of Princess's Place to fetch
this baby and its nurse, and walked back with them, and walked home
with them again, and continually mounted guard over them; and the
perseverance with which she nursed it herself, and fed it, and played
with it, and froze its young blood with airs upon the harpsichord, was
extraordinary. At about this same period too, she was seized with a
passion for looking at a certain bracelet; also with a passion for
looking at the moon, of which she would take long observations from
her chamber window. But whatever she looked at; sun, moon, stars, or
bracelet; she looked no more at the Major. And the Major whistled, and
stared, and wondered, and dodged about his room, and could make nothing
of it.

'You'll quite win my brother Paul's heart, and that's the truth, my
dear,' said Mrs Chick, one day.

Miss Tox turned pale.

'He grows more like Paul every day,' said Mrs Chick.

Miss Tox returned no other reply than by taking the little Paul in her
arms, and making his cockade perfectly flat and limp with her caresses.

'His mother, my dear,' said Miss Tox, 'whose acquaintance I was to have
made through you, does he at all resemble her?'

'Not at all,' returned Louisa

'She was--she was pretty, I believe?' faltered Miss Tox.

'Why, poor dear Fanny was interesting,' said Mrs Chick, after some
judicial consideration. 'Certainly interesting. She had not that air
of commanding superiority which one would somehow expect, almost as
a matter of course, to find in my brother's wife; nor had she that
strength and vigour of mind which such a man requires.'

Miss Tox heaved a deep sigh.

'But she was pleasing:' said Mrs Chick: 'extremely so. And she
meant!--oh, dear, how well poor Fanny meant!'

'You Angel!' cried Miss Tox to little Paul. 'You Picture of