y knees,
night and morning for having given you back to me in my old age.

"Your ever affectionate aunt,

"Caroline.

"P. S.--You remember pretty little Kitty Hardwicke you used to flirt
with, who married young St. Clair, who's now Lord Kidderminster?
She's just had three at a birth; she had twins only last year; the
Queen's delighted. Pray be careful about never getting wet feet--"

One stormy evening in May, Mrs. Gibson drove Ida and Leah and me and
Mr. Babbage, a middle-aged but very dapper War Office clerk (who was
a friend of the Gibson family), to Chelsea, that we might explore
Cheyne Walk and its classic neighborhood. I rode on the box by the
coachman.

We alighted by the steamboat pier and explored, I walking with Leah.

We came to a very narrow street, quite straight, the narrowest
street that could call itself a street at all, and rather long; we
were the only people in it. It has since disappeared, with all that
particular part of Chelsea.

Suddenly we saw a runaway horse without a rider coming along it at
full gallop, straight at us, with a most demoralizing sharp clatter
of its iron hoofs on the stone pavement.

"Your backs to the wall!" cried Mr. Babbage, and we flattened
ourselves to let the maddened brute go by, bridle and stirrups
flying--poor Mrs. Gibson almost faint with terror.

Leah, instead of flattening herself against the wall, put her arms
round her mother, making of her own body a shield for her, and
looked round at the horse as it came tearing up the street, striking
sparks from the flag-stones.

Nobody was hurt, for a wonder; but Mrs. Gibson was quite overcome.
Mr. Babbage was very angry with Leah, whose back the horse actually
grazed, as he all but caught his hoofs in her crinoline and hit her
with a stirrup on the shoulder.

I could only think of Leah's face as she looked round at the
approaching horse, with her protecting arms round her mother. It was
such a sudden revelation to me of what she really was, and its
expression was so hauntingly impressive that I could think of
nothing else. Its mild, calm courage, its utter carelessness of
self, its immense tenderness--all blazed out in such beautiful
lines, in such beautiful white and black, that I lost all
self-control; and when we walked back to the pier, following the
rest of the party, I asked her to be my wife.

She turned very pale again,