had any, was burnt out and dead long ago. What
she did for him she did from duty; but duty was not strong enough to
restrain that little member the tongue; and Lois's heart often bled at
the continual flow of contemptuous reproof which Grace constantly
addressed to her husband, even while she was sparing no pains or
trouble to minister to his bodily ease and comfort. It was more as a
relief to herself that she spoke in this way, than with any desire that
her speeches should affect him; and he was too deadened by illness to
feel hurt by them; or, it may be, the constant repetition of her
sarcasms had made him indifferent; at any rate, so that he had his food
and his state of bodily warmth attended to, he very seldom seemed to
care much for anything else. Even his first flow of affection towards
Lois was soon exhausted; he cared for her because she arranged his
pillows well and skilfully, and because she could prepare new and
dainty kinds of food for his sick appetite, but no longer for her as
his dead sister's child. Still he did care for her, and Lois was too
glad of this little hoard of affection to examine how or why it was
given. To him she could give pleasure, but apparently to no one else in
that household. Her aunt looked askance at her for many reasons: the
first coming of Lois to Salem was inopportune, the expression of
disapprobation on her face on that evening still lingered and rankled
in Grace's memory, early prejudices, and feelings, and prepossessions
of the English girl were all on the side of what would now be called
Church and State, what was then esteemed in that country a
superstitious observance of the directions of a Popish rubric, and a
servile regard for the family of an oppressing and irreligious king.
Nor is it to be supposed that Lois did not feel, and feel acutely, the
want of sympathy that all those with whom she was now living manifested
towards the old hereditary loyalty (religious as well as political
loyalty) in which she had been brought up. With her aunt and Manasseh
it was more than want of sympathy; it was positive, active antipathy to
all the ideas Lois held most dear. The very allusion, however
incidentally made, to the little old grey church at Barford, where her
father had preached so long,--the occasional reference to the troubles
in which her own country had been distracted when she left,--and the
adherence, in which she had been brought up, to the notion that the
king could do