, now
the only carriage kept at Brandon's house. He sprang out as if in urgent
haste, and burst into the room in a great hurry.

"John," he exclaimed, "can you lend me your phaeton, or give me a mount
as far as the junction? Fred Walker has had one of his attacks, and
Emily is in a terrible fright. She wants another opinion: she wishes Dr.
Limpsey to be fetched, and she wants Grand to come to her."

This last desire, mentioned as the two hurried together to the stable,
showed John that Emily apprehended danger.

Emily's joyous and impassioned nature, though she lived safely, as it
were, in the middle of her own sweet world--saw the best of it, made the
best of it, and coloured it all, earth and sky, with her tender
hopefulness--was often conscious of something yet to come, ready and
expectant of _the rest of it_. The rest of life, she meant; the rest of
sorrow, love, and feeling.

She had a soul full of unused treasures of emotion, and pure, clear
depths of passion that as yet slumbered unstirred. If her heart was a
lute, its highest and lowest chords had never been sounded hitherto.
This also she was aware of, and she knew what their music would be like
when it came.

She had been in her girlhood the chief idol of many hearts; but joyous,
straightforward, and full of childlike sweetness, she had looked on all
her adorers in such an impartially careless fashion, that not one of
them could complain. Then, having confided to John Mortimer's wife that
she could get up no enthusiasm for any of them, and thought there could
be none of that commodity in her nature, she had at last consented, on
great persuasion, to take the man who had loved her all her life,
"because he wouldn't go away, and she didn't know what else to do with
him; he was such a devoted little fellow, too, and she liked him so much
better than either of his brothers!"

So they were married; Captain Walker was excessively proud and happy in
his wife, and Mrs. Walker was as joyous and sweet as ever. She had
satisfied the kindly pity which for a long while had made her very
uncomfortable on his account; and, O happy circumstance! she became in
course of time the mother of the most attractive, wonderful, and
interesting child ever born. In the eyes, however, of the invidious
world, he was uncommonly like his plain sickly father, and not, with
that exception, at all distinguished from other children.

John made haste to send Valentine off to the junction