“Give your attention, dear aunt, to this precious book—­and you will give me all I ask.”  With those words, I handed it to her open, at a marked passage—­one continuous burst of burning eloquence!  Subject:  Satan among the Sofa Cushions.

Poor Lady Verinder (reclining thoughtlessly on her own sofa cushions) glanced at the book, and handed it back to me looking more confused than ever.

“I’m afraid, Drusilla,” she said, “I must wait till I am a little better, before I can read that.  The doctor——­”

The moment she mentioned the doctor’s name, I knew what was coming.  Over and over again in my past experience among my perishing fellow-creatures, the members of the notoriously infidel profession of Medicine had stepped between me and my mission of mercy—­on the miserable pretence that the patient wanted quiet, and that the disturbing influence of all others which they most dreaded, was the influence of Miss Clack and her Books.  Precisely the same blinded materialism (working treacherously behind my back) now sought to rob me of the only right of property that my poverty could claim—­my right of spiritual property in my perishing aunt.

“The doctor tells me,” my poor misguided relative went on, “that I am not so well to-day.  He forbids me to see any strangers; and he orders me, if I read at all, only to read the lightest and the most amusing books.  ’Do nothing, Lady Verinder, to weary your head, or to quicken your pulse’—­those were his last words, Drusilla, when he left me to-day.”

There was no help for it but to yield again—­for the moment only, as before.  Any open assertion of the infinitely superior importance of such a ministry as mine, compared with the ministry of the medical man, would only have provoked the doctor to practise on the human weakness of his patient, and to threaten to throw up the case.  Happily, there are more ways than one of sowing the good seed, and few persons are better versed in those ways than myself.

“You might feel stronger, dear, in an hour or two,” I said.  “Or you might wake, to-morrow morning, with a sense of something wanting, and even this unpretending volume might be able to supply it.  You will let me leave the book, aunt?  The doctor can hardly object to that!”

I slipped it under the sofa cushions, half in, and half out, close by her handkerchief, and her smelling-bottle.  Every time her hand searched for either of these, it would touch the book; and, sooner or later (who knows?) the book might touch her.  After making this arrangement, I thought it wise to withdraw.  “Let me leave you to repose, dear aunt; I will call again to-morrow.”  I looked accidentally towards the window as I said that.  It was full of flowers, in boxes and pots.  Lady Verinder was extravagantly fond of these perishable treasures, and had a habit of rising every now and then, and going to look at them and smell them.  A new idea flashed across my mind.  “Oh! may I take