"You must remember," added her mother, "that the next will be your second season. You did not come out till late, that you might not interfere with Mary. Yet there she is still on my hands, and looking as pale as a ghost. I am in a dreadful fright lest you should go off, as she did, about two and twenty; and what I shall do with you then, Heaven knows!"
Appalled with the awful prospect of two daughters unmarried at past two and twenty, Lady Anne sank back in the carriage, as much overcome as she could be by any emotion. The silence was broken by Helen's exclaiming—
"Well, I am glad of our return to London for one reason—we shall see the Palmers again."
"What you can all see to like in those odious Palmers," cried her ladyship, disdain and dignity mingled in her attitude, "I cannot conceive."
"Dearest mamma," said Helen, "only think how kind Mrs. Palmer was when we had the fever!"
"Oh, yes; she is the only sort of person for a nurse. She always," cried Lady Anne, with a sneer, "comes to you with a receipt for a pudding in one hand to make you ill, and then a prescription in the other to cure you."
Helen, whose chief ideas of comfort and kindness were taken from the Palmers, said nothing: as wise a plan as can well be pursued in all cases of domestic disagreement.
The faint line of light that trembles on the dusky
