“Yes; but Lucy has been injuring her health by her close study,” remarked the more observant Sophy.  “Look at her now, how pale and thin she is, compared with what she was when she came!”

“Oh, the holidays will set me all right again,” Lucy declared, laughing; but Mrs. Brooke decided that Lucy needed immediate change of air.  She had been hoping to be able to spend her holidays at Ashleigh, among her old friends; and as the Brookes were all going to a fashionable seaside resort, it seemed likely that nothing would occur to prevent the hoped-for visit.  But Amy’s cough, as well as other symptoms of delicacy of the lungs, had increased so much, that the doctor declared the sea-air too keen for her, and that she had better be sent, during the warm season, to a quiet inland place in the neighbourhood, the air of which he thought particularly suited to her constitution.  But of course Amy could not be sent there alone, and none of the rest would have been willing to give up their proposed visit to the seaside, except Mrs. Brooke, who could not be spared from her duties to her other daughters.

Lucy therefore seemed the one who should accompany Amy, and she herself felt that it was an occasion on which she might make some return for the kindness she had met with in her uncle’s family.  So her visit to Ashleigh was given up, and Amy’s delight at finding that she was to accompany her to Oakvale, was enough to make her forget any disappointment which her decision had involved.  They were to be received into the family of a friend of the doctor’s, a widow lady, who frequently received invalids as boarders, with whom little Amy would receive all the care and comfort she needed.

A few days before their departure, Lucy at last received, through Bessie Ford, the address of Nelly Connor’s mistress.  Stella, who, notwithstanding her raillery at Lucy’s protegee, had a sort of latent interest in Nelly, from her association with her pleasant visit to Ashleigh, accompanied her cousin in her long walk to look for the house.  On reaching it at last, tired and hot, the door was opened, not by Nelly, as Lucy had hoped, but by an unprepossessing-looking woman, whose hard face grew more rigid when informed what was the object of her visit.

“You needn’t come here to look for her,” she replied grimly; “she’s left this some time since, and I don’t never want to set eyes on her again.”

“Is she not here, then?  Where is she gone?”

“I don’t know,” was the reply, “and I don’t want to know.  A girl that could behave as she done to one who took such pains with her, and kept her so long, ain’t a girl to my taste.  I wash my hands of her.”

“But perhaps you could tell us what place she went to from you?” persisted Lucy.  “I am a friend of hers, and would like to find her out.”

“Well, she is no credit to her friends,” said the woman, rather pleased at being able to give her a bad character where it might be of some consequence.  “And as for the vagrant character she went off with, I’d be very sorry to have any acquaintance with him.”