“I will go and fetch it,” said Mary, an honest, but harassed-looking girl.

“Always in haste,” said Miss Gould, with an effort at good humour, which Miss Ogilvie direfully mistrusted.  “No, Mary, you must remain to entertain your cousin.  What are servants for but to wait on us?  She thinks nothing can be done without her, Miss Ogilvie, and I am forced to act repression sometimes.”

“Indeed we do not wish for any tea,” said Miss Ogilvie, seeing Elvira look as black as thunder; “we have only just dined.”

“But Elfie will have some sweet-cake; Elfie likes auntie’s sweet-cake, eh?” said the old man.

“No, thank you,” said Elfie, glumly, though in fact she did care considerably for sweets, and was always buying bonbons.

“No cake!  Or some strawberries-—strawberries and cream,” said her grandfather.  “Mr. Allen always liked them.  And where is Mr. Allen now, my dear?”

“Gone to Norway.  It’s the fifth time I’ve told him so,” muttered Elvira.

“And where is Mr. Robert?  And Mr. Lucas?” he went on.  “Fine young gentlemen all of them; but Mr. Allen is the pleasant-spoken one.  Ain’t he coming down soon?  He always looks in and says, ’I don’t forget your good cider, Mr. Gould,’” and there was a feeble chuckling laugh and old man’s cough.

“Do let me go into the garden; I’m quite faint,” cried Elvira, jumping up.

It was true that the room was very close, rather medicinal, and not improved by Miss Gould’s perfumes; but there was an alacrity about Elfie’s movements, and a vehemence in the manner of her rejection of the said essences, which made her governess not think her case alarming, and she left her to the care of the young cousins, while trying to make up for her incivility by courteously listening to and answering her grandfather, and consuming the tea and sweet-cake.

When she went out to fetch her pupil to say goodbye, Miss Gould detained her on the way to obtain condolence on the “dreadful trial that old uncle was,” and speak of her own great devotion to him and the children, and the sacrifices she had made.  She said she had been at school with Elvira’s poor mamma, “a sweetly pretty girl, poor dear, but so indulged.”

And then she tried to extract confidences as to Mrs. Brownlow’s intentions towards the child, in which of course she was baffled.

Elvira was found ranging among the strawberries, with Mary and Kate looking on somewhat dissatisfied.

Both the poor girls looked constrained and unhappy, and Miss Ogilvie wondered whether “Cousin Lisette’s” evident intentions of becoming a fixture would be for their good or the reverse.

“Are you better, my dear?” asked she, affectionately.

“Yes, it was only the room,” said Elvira.

“You are a good deal there, are not you?” said Miss Ogilvie to Mary, who had the white flabby look of being kept in an unwholesome atmosphere.