“Well, mamma!  Do not cry out before you are hurt.  I am not going to say anything wrong.  I won’t give you more annoyance than you can help, you pretty kind mamma.  Yes, and your little Trix is a naughty little Trix, and she leaves undone those things which she ought to have done, and does those things which she ought not to have done, and there’s—­well now—­I won’t go on.  Yes, I will, unless you kiss me.”  And with this the young lady lays aside her paper, and runs up to her mother and performs a variety of embraces with her ladyship, saying as plain as eyes could speak to Mr. Esmond—­“There, sir:  would not you like to play the very same pleasant game?”

“Indeed, madam, I would,” says he.

“Would what?” asked Miss Beatrix.

“What you meant when you looked at me in that provoking way,” answers Esmond.

“What a confessor!” cries Beatrix, with a laugh.

“What is it Henry would like, my dear?” asks her mother, the kind soul, who was always thinking what we would like, and how she could please us.

The girl runs up to her—­“Oh, you silly kind mamma,” she says, kissing her again, “that’s what Harry would like;” and she broke out into a great joyful laugh; and Lady Castlewood blushed as bashful as a maid of sixteen.

“Look at her, Harry,” whispers Beatrix, running up, and speaking in her sweet low tones.  “Doesn’t the blush become her?  Isn’t she pretty?  She looks younger than I am, and I am sure she is a hundred million thousand times better.”

Esmond’s kind mistress left the room, carrying her blushes away with her.

“If we girls at Court could grow such roses as that,” continues Beatrix, with her laugh, “what wouldn’t we do to preserve ’em?  We’d clip their stalks and put ’em in salt and water.  But those flowers don’t bloom at Hampton Court and Windsor, Henry.”  She paused for a minute, and the smile fading away from her April face, gave place to a menacing shower of tears; “Oh, how good she is, Harry,” Beatrix went on to say.  “Oh, what a saint she is!  Her goodness frightens me.  I’m not fit to live with her.  I should be better I think if she were not so perfect.  She has had a great sorrow in her life, and a great secret; and repented of it.  It could not have been my father’s death.  She talks freely about that; nor could she have loved him very much—­though who knows what we women do love, and why?”

“What, and why, indeed,” says Mr. Esmond.

“No one knows,” Beatrix went on, without noticing this interruption except by a look, “what my mother’s life is.  She hath been at early prayer this morning; she passes hours in her closet; if you were to follow her thither, you would find her at prayers now.  She tends the poor of the place—­the horrid dirty poor!  She sits through the curate’s sermons—­oh, those dreary sermons!  And you see on a beau dire; but good as they are, people like her are not fit to commune with us of the world.  There is always,