One thing was certain, that by degrees the young woman’s faults lessened; even that worst of them, the unmistakable bad temper, not aggressive, but obstinately sullen, which made her and Miss Selina sometimes not on speaking terms for a week together.  But she simply “sulked;” she never grumbled or was pert; and she did her work just as usual—­with a kind of dogged struggle not only against the superior powers but against something within herself much harder to fight with.

“She makes me feel more sorry for her than angry with her,” Miss Leaf would sometimes say, coming out of the kitchen with that grieved face, which was the chief sign of displeasure her sweet nature ever betrayed.  “She will have up-hill work through life, like us all, and more than many of us, poor child!”

But gradually Elizabeth, too, copying involuntarily the rest of the family, learned to put up with Miss Selina; who, on her part, kept a sort of armed neutrality.  And once, when a short but sharp illness of Johanna’s shook the house from its even tenor, startled every body out of their little tempers, and made them cling together and work together in a sort of fear-stricken union against one common grief, Selina allowed that they might have gone farther and fared worse on the day they engaged Elizabeth.

After this illness of his Aunt.  Ascott came home.  It was his first visit since he had gone to London:  Mr. Ascott, he said, objected to holidays.  But now, from some unexplained feeling, Johanna in her convalescence longed after the boy—­no longer a boy, however, but nearly twenty, and looking fully his age.  How proud his aunts were to march him up the town, and hear every body’s congratulations on his good looks and polished manners!  It was the old story—­old as the hills!  I do not pretend to invent any thing new.  Women, especially maiden aunts, will repeat the tale till the end of time, so long as they have youths belonging to them on whom to expend their natural tendency to clinging fondness, and ignorant, innocent hero worship.  The Misses Leaf—­ay, even Selina, whose irritation against the provoking boy was quite mollified by the elegant young man—­were no wiser than their neighbors.

But there was one person in the household who still obstinately refused to bow the knee to Ascott.  Whether it was, as psychologists might explain, some instinctive polarity in their natures; or whether, having once conceived a prejudice, Elizabeth held on to it like grim death; still there was the same unspoken antagonism between them.  The young fellow took little notice of her except to observe “that she hadn’t grown any handsomer;’ but Elizabeth watched him with a keen severity that overlooked nothing, and resisted, with a passive pertinacity that was quite irresistible, all his encroachments on the family habits, all the little self-pleasing ways which Ascott had been so used to of old, that neither he nor his aunts apparently recognized them as selfish.