."

"I hope I do, granny," replied Mr. Aubrey, seriously.

"I see! I hear!--my broth! my broth!--where is it?"

"Here it is, granny," said the girl--"It's all ready!"

"Good-day, dame," said Mr. Aubrey, gently disengaging his hand from
hers; and before they had left the cottage, she began to swallow very
greedily the broth with which the little girl fed her.

"This is the sort of way in which this old superannuated creature has
frightened one or two of"----

"Is it indeed?" inquired Mr. Aubrey, with a sort of mechanical smile.
Dr. Tatham saw that he was in a somewhat serious humor.

"She's alarmed _you_, I protest!--I protest she has!" exclaimed the
doctor, with a slight laugh, as they walked along. Now, he knew the
disposition and character of Aubrey intimately; and was well aware of a
certain tendency which he had to superstition.

"My dear doctor, I assure you that you are mistaken--I am indeed not
_alarmed_--but at the same time I will tell you something not a little
singular. Would you believe that a month or two ago, when in town, I
dreamed that I heard some one uttering something very much like the
words which we have just heard from this old woman?"

"Ah! ha, ha!" laughed the doctor; and, after a second or two's pause,
Aubrey, as if ashamed of what he had said, echoed the laugh, and their
conversation passed on to political topics, which kept them engaged for
the remainder of their walk, Mr. Aubrey quitting his companion at the
door of the vicarage, to be rejoined by him at five o'clock, the dinner
hour at the Hall. As Mr. Aubrey walked along the park, the shades of
evening casting a deepening gloom around him, his thoughts involuntarily
recurred to the cottage of old blind Bess, and he felt vague
apprehensions flitting with darkening shade across his mind. Though he
was hardly weak enough to attach any definite meaning or importance to
the gibberish he had heard, it still had left an unpleasant
_impression_, and he was vexed at feeling a wish that the
incident--trifling as he was willing to believe it--should not be
mentioned by Dr. Tatham at the Hall; and still more was he excited when
he recollected that he had _purposely abstained_ from requesting the
good doctor not to do so. All this undoubtedly implied that the matter
had occupied Mr. Aubrey's thoughts to a greater extent than he secretly
relished. On reaching, however, the Hall door, this brief pressure on
his feelings quickly ceased; for on en