“I’ll leave the tea-things up-stairs,” said Mother.

But Madam Liberality shook her head vigorously.  She had been making up her mind, as she sat steaming over the old teapot; and now she wrote on her slate, “Put a white cloth round the tub, and put out the tea-things like a tea-party, and put a ticket in the slop-basin—­For Darling.  With very, VERY Best Love.  Make the last ‘very’ very big.”

Madam Liberality’s mother nodded, but she was printing a ticket; much too large a ticket, however, to go into the green and white slop-basin.  When it was done she hung it on the tree, under the angel.  The inscription was—­From Madam Liberality.

When supper was over, she came up to Madam Liberality’s room, and said,

“Now, my dear, if you like to change your mind and put off the tree till you are better, I will say nothing about it.”

But Madam Liberality shook her head more vehemently than before, and her mother smiled and went away.

Madam Liberality strained her ears.  The book-room door opened—­she knew the voice of the handle—­there was a rush and a noise, but it died away into the room.  The tears broke down Madam Liberality’s cheeks.  It was hard not to be there now.  Then there was a patter up the stairs, and flying steps along the landing, and Madam Liberality’s door was opened by Darling.  She was dressed in the pink dress, and her cheeks were pinker still, and her eyes full of tears.  And she threw herself at Madam Liberality’s feet, crying,

“Oh how good, how very good you are!”

At this moment a roar came up from below, and Madam Liberality wrote,

“What is it?” and then dropped the slate to clutch the arms of her chair, for the pain was becoming almost intolerable.  Before Darling could open the door her mother came in, and Darling repeated the question,

“What is it?”

But at this moment the reply came from below, in Tom’s loudest tones.  It rang through the house, and up into the bedroom.

“Three cheers for Madam Liberality!  Hip, hip, hooray!”

The extremes of pleasure and of pain seemed to meet in Madam Liberality’s little head.  But overwhelming gratification got the upper hand, and, forgetting even her quinsy, she tried to speak, and after a brief struggle she said, with tolerable distinctness,

“Tell Tom I am very much obliged to him.”

But what they did tell Tom was that the quinsy had broken, on which he gave three cheers more.

PART II.

Madam Liberality grew up into much the same sort of person that she was when a child.  She always had been what is termed old-fashioned, and the older she grew the better her old-fashionedness became her, so that at last her friends would say to her, “Ah, if we all wore as well as you do, my dear!  You’ve hardly changed at all since we remember you in short petticoats.”  So far as she did change the change was for the better. (It is to be hoped we do improve a little as we get older!) She was still liberal and economical.  She still planned and hoped indefatigably.  She was still tender-hearted in the sense in which Gray speaks,