“By Jove, you’ve hit it!” cried Ascott, starting up.  “What a thing a woman’s head is!  I’ve turned over scheme after scheme, but I never once thought of any thing so simple as that.  Bravo, Elizabeth!  You’re a remarkable woman.”

She smiled—­a very sad smile—­but still she felt glad.  Any thing that she could possibly do for any creature belonging to her dear mistresses seemed to this faithful servant the natural and bounden duty of her life.

Long after the young man, whose mercurial temperament no trouble could repress, had gone away in excellent spirits, leaving her an address where she could always find him, and give him regular news of his aunts, though he made her promise to give them, as yet, no tidings in return, Elizabeth sat still, watching the sun decline and the shadows lengthen over the field of graves.  In the calmness and beauty of this solitary place an equal calm seemed to come over her; a sense of how wonderfully events had linked themselves together and worked themselves out; how even poor Tom’s mournful death had brought about this meeting, which might end in restoring to her beloved mistresses their lost sheep, their outcast, miserable boy.  She did not reason the matter out, but she felt it, and felt that in making her in some degree His instrument God had been very good to her in the midst of her desolation.

It seemed Elizabeth’s lot always to have to put aside her own troubles for the trouble of somebody else.  Almost immediately after Tom Cliffe’s death her little Henry fell ill with scarlatina and remained for many months in a state of health so fragile as to engross all her thought and care.  It was with difficulty that she contrived a few times to go for Henry’s medicines to the shop where “John Smith” served.

She noticed that every time he looked healthier, brighter, freer from that aspect of broken-down respectability which had touched her so much.  He did not dress any better, but still “the gentleman” in him could never be hidden or lost, and he said his master treated him “like a gentleman,” which was apparently a pleasant novelty.

“I have some time to myself also.  Shop shuts at nine, and I get up at 5 A. M.—­bless us! what would my Aunt Hilary say?  And it’s not for nothing.  There are more ways than one of turning an honest penny, when a young fellow really sets about it.  Elizabeth, you used to be a literary character yourself; look into the ——­ and the ——­,” (naming two popular magazines), “and if you find a series of especially clever papers on sanitary reform, and so on, I did ’em:” 

He slapped his chest with Ascott’s merry laugh of old.  It cheered Elizabeth for a long while afterward.

By-and-by she had to take little Henry to Brighton, and lost sight of “John Smith” for some time longer.

It was on a snowy February day, when, having brought the child home quite strong, and received unlimited gratitude and guineas from the delighted father, Master Henry’s faithful nurse stood in her usual place at the dining-room door, waiting for the interminable grace of “only five minutes more” to be over, and her boy carried ignominiously but contentedly to bed.