The Queen of Hearts

e had recovered from our bewilderment the garde

cloak over it — little neatly-gloved hands, which seized in an instant on one of mine and on one of Owen’s — two dark blue eyes, which seemed to look us both through and through in a moment — a clear, full, merrily co

of the next six weeks. I beg pardon, with all possible humility, for the offense of coming ten days before my time. Don’t ask me t

with a bright confidence in her own flow

n I went down to breakfast, I said to my aunt, ‘Darling, I have an irresistible impulse to go to Wales at once, instead of waiting till the twentieth.’ She made all the necessary objections, poor dear, and my impulse got stronger and stronger with every one of them. ‘I’m quite certain,’ I said, ‘I shall never go at all if I don’t go now.’ ‘In that case,’ says my aunt, ‘ring the bell, and have your trunks packed. Your whole future depends on your going; and you terrify me so inexpressibly that I shall be glad to get rid of you.’ You may not think it, to look at her — but Matilda is a treasure; and in three hours more I was on the Great Western Railway. I have not the least idea how

etty and becoming, passing quickly over the sunshine and gayety of her face as she saluted us. The next moment she was on her feet

y to receive her. She whisked into the rooms — looked all round them — whisked out again — declared she had come to live in the old Tower, and not in any modern addition to it, and f

calling down to us, eagerly,

but, if you would li

e. The next sound we heard, as we slowly followed her, was a

we heard her ask

circumstances, I was there; but that, li

nd ends of dismal, old-fashioned furniture for which we had no use, and grimly ornamented by a life-size basket figure supporting a complete suit of armor in a sadly rusty condition. When Owen a

said, looking round at us

g it impossible to move her, we bargained that she should, at least, allow the new bed and the rest of the comfortable furniture in the lean-to to be moved up into the empty room for her sleeping accommodation. She

ness; and darted downstairs in mad high spirits, screaming for Matilda and the trunks like a child for a set of new toys. The wholesome protest of Nature against the artificial restraints of modern life expressed itself in all that she said and in all that she did. She had never known what it was to be happy before, because she had never been allowed, until now, to do anything for herself. She was down on her knees at one moment, blowing the fire, and telling us that she felt like Cinderella; she was up on a

a corner, frowned on the upholsterer’s brand-new toilet-table, and held a miscellaneous assortment of combs, hairpins, and brushes. Here stood a gloomy antique chair, the patriarch of its tribe, whose arms of blackened oak embraced a pair of pert, new deal bonnet-boxes not a fortnight old. There, thrown down lightly on a rugged tapestry table-cover, the long labor of centuries past, lay the brief, delicate work of a w

the outset for the due recognition of her authority by the household generally and individually having briskly planned out all her own forthcoming occupations and amusements over the wine and fruit at dessert, and having positively settled, between her first and second cups of tea, where our

rdly believe that I had actually wasted hours of precious time in worrying myself and everybody else in the house about the best means of labori

if she were part and parcel of himself. With an old water-proof cloak of mine on her shoulders, with a broad-flapped Spanish hat of Owen’s on her head, with a wild imp of a Welsh boy following her as guide and groom on a bare-backed pony, and with one of the largest and ugliest cur-

ody in the house, she spent hours in the kitchen, learning to make puddings and pies, and trying all sorts of recipes with very varying success, from an antiquated cookery book which she had discovered at the back of my bookshelves. At other times, when I expected her to be upstairs, languidly

ad ordered for her, she left them in the box, and put her feet on it when she felt sleepy after a hard day’s riding. Instead of practicing for hours every evening at the piano, which I had hired with such a firm conviction of her using it, she showed us tricks on the cards, taught us new games, initiated us into the mystics of dominoes, challenged us with riddles, an even attempted to stimulate us into acting charades — in short, tried every evening amusement in the whole ca

y teaches in similar perfection to men. She saw at a glance all the underlying tenderness and generosity concealed beneath Owen’s external shyness, irresolution, and occasional reserve; and, from first to last, even

my case she put both her hands on my shoulders, raised herself on tiptoe, and saluted me briskly on both checks in the foreign way. She never differed in opinion with Owen without propitiating him first by some little artful compliment in the way of e

d in her two rooms on the third story; had insisted on knowing why he lived at the top of the tower, and why he had not appeared to welcome her at

im to make appointments with her, or tenderly inquiring how he would like to see her hair dressed at dinner on that day. She followed him into the garden, sometimes to ask for the privilege of smelling his tobacco-smoke, sometimes to beg for a lock of his hair, or a fragment of his ragged old dressing-gown, to put among her keepsakes. She sig

and, all things considered, not without pleasure to herself. Day followed day in calm and smooth succession, and five quiet weeks had elapsed out of the six during which her stay was to last without any remarkable occurrence to distinguish them,