dear----'

But there her sentence was cut short by Betty springing up suddenly and
flinging both arms round her.

'Angel,' she cried, 'if you talk like that I'll never forgive you. If
he can't be good with you to teach him he doesn't deserve to have you
for his relation. And you are always to scold me--only it mustn't be
when he is there--if I forget about growing up and do stupid things and
make myself so that he can't respect me. And perhaps by-and-bye, if
you tell me, and I try very hard indeed, I may get to be a real, good,
proper, sensible maiden aunt.'

[Illustration: Chapter I tailpiece]

[Illustration: Chapter II headpiece]

CHAPTER II

THE NEPHEW

'Hers is a spirit deep and crystal clear:
Calmly beneath her earnest face it lies,
Free without boldness, meek without a fear,
Quicker to look than speak its sympathies.'--LOWELL.

As Betty Wyndham had said, she and Angel were not very well off for
relations. Angelica's memory held some faint, faraway pictures of
mother and father, which she had dreamt over so often that they were
always fair and tender like the hazy distance of an autumn landscape.
Dimly, too, she could recollect the time of loss and loneliness and
half-understood grief when she cried herself to sleep at night for want
of the familiar kisses, and she had hazy remembrances of strange faces
and changes, and a time when the cottage by Oakfield Common was a new
home, and Cousin Amelia Crayshaw, the elderly relation, with whom she
and Betty were to live (and who had died two years before this story
begins), was a stranger--a rather alarming stranger, so unlike mamma,
that it seemed unnatural to go to her for things, and ask her
questions, and say the Catechism to her on Sunday.

And there was one other recollection which Angel had thought of and
talked to Betty about so often, that it made quite a landmark in her
life: the recollection of a day in that dreary time when she sat, a
little lonely, frightened child, only dimly understanding the meaning
of her black frock, by the cradle where baby Betty was asleep, crying
in a hushed, awed way, as much at the grave faces and the drawn blinds
as because papa and mamma had gone away, for they must surely come back
by-and-bye.

Then her nurse Penelope looked into the darkened room, with a face
swollen with crying, and said in a whisper, 'Miss Angel dear, speak to
your brother,' and pushed in a lad whom Angel had never s