as you're low.
Coffee and cocoa and that's fine and warming of a morning; but when the
afternoon do come, and you feels low----"

"Why should you feel low more in the afternoon than in the morning, Mrs.
Bagley? There's no reason in that."

"Ain't there, miss? There's a deal of 'uman nature, though. Not young
ladies like you, that have everything as you want; but even my Lizzie,
I find as she wants her tea badly afternoons."

"And so do we," said Chatty, "especially when we don't go out. Look
here, this is just the same as the last we had. Mrs. Wilberforce had
such a pretty pattern yesterday,--a pattern that made a great deal of
appearance, and yet went so quick in working. She had done a quarter of
a yard in a day."

"You'll find it there, miss," said the old woman. "Mrs. Wilberforce
don't get her patterns nowhere but from me. Lizzie chose it herself,
last time she went to Highcombe. And they all do say as the child has
real good taste, better nor many a lady. Lizzie! Why, here's the young
ladies, and you never showing. Lizzie, child! She's terribly taken up
with a--with a--no, I can't call it a job,--with an offer she's had."

"An offer! Do you mean a real _offer_?" cried the girls together, with
excitement, both in a breath.

"Oh, not a hoffer of marriage, miss, if that's what you're thinking of,
though she's had them too. This is just as hard to make up her mind
about. Not to me," said the old woman. "But perhaps I've give her too
much of her own way, and now when I says, Don't, she up and says, Why,
granny? It ain't always so easy to say why; but when your judgment's
agin it, without no reason, I'm always for following the judgment.
Lizzie! Perhaps, miss, you'd give her your advice."

Lizzie came out, as this was said, through the little glass door, with
a little muslin curtain veiling the lower panes, which opened into the
room beyond. She made a curtsey, as in duty bound, to the young ladies,
but she said with some petulance, "I ain't deaf, granny," as she did so.

"She has always got her little word to say for herself," the old
woman replied, with a smile. She had opened the glass case which held
the muslin patterns, and was turning them over with the tips of her
fingers,--those fingers which had so many different kinds of goods to
touch, and were not, perhaps, adapted for white muslin. "Look at this
one, miss; it's bluebells that is, just for all the world like the
bluebells in the woods in the month o