‘Find a bed for you, darling!’ said Mrs Llewellyn. ‘Why, your father and I would turn out of our own sooner than you shouldn’t lie easy the first night you come back to us. But your own room is ready for you, Nell. No one has slept in it since you went away,--not even Hetty--and Martha has been setting it to rights for you all the evening. Will you come to it now, my dear, for you look ready to drop with fatigue?’ Nell was only too glad to accept the offer, and Mrs Llewellyn conducted her upstairs, and undressed her, and put her to bed with all the tenderness and solicitude she had shown in performing the same offices when she was a little child. Is there ever a time when a mother ceases to regard the creature she has brought into the world as other than a child? He may be a bearded man, the father of a family, or the hero of a nation--or she may be a weary and harassed woman, full of care and anxieties; but to their mothers they are always children, to be looked after, loved and cared for. There is no position in which maternal love shines more brightly than when the infant she has nourished at her breast is returned upon her hands, a man or woman, perhaps in middle age, but weak, ill, helpless, and requiring a mother’s care. She may mourn over the necessity, but how she revels in having her baby back again, as dependent on her as when he or she had not yet begun to walk! Who would nurse him and watch him, and know neither fatigue or privation for his sake as she can do? Happy those who have a mother to fly to when they are ill or miserable! Mrs Llewellyn smoothed out Nell’s luxuriant braids of hair, revelling in their beauty, and put her own best night-dress on her, and laid her between the snow-white sheets as if she had been four years old, instead of four-and-twenty. But this latter necessity brought an awkward question in its train. Where had Nell left her own things? Had she brought them with her and deposited them at the railway station, or were they to follow her from London? At first the girl was silent. She did not know what to say. The awkwardness of the situation had not struck her before. Her face blanched still paler, and her mother saw she had introduced an embarrassing subject. Nell had turned round on her pillow and hidden her face from view. ‘Never mind thinking about it to-night, my dear,’ said Mrs Llewellyn kindly; ‘you’re too tired. Try and go to sleep, Nell, and you can tell me everything to-morrow.’ ‘Yes,’ murmured Nell, with her face still hidden, ‘you shall hear all about it to-morrow. I have no box with me, mother. I--I got into a little scrape--debt, you know--and I had to part with my clothes. You won’t be angry with me?’