It was nearly dark when the carriage returned; and Sir Cradock came down to the great entrance–hall to meet his brotherʼs child. He was trembling with anxiety; for his nerves were rapidly failing him; and, from Dr. Huttonʼs account, he feared to see in his probable heiress—for now he had no heir—something very outlandish and savage. Therefore he was surprised and delighted when a graceful and beautiful girl, with high birth and elegance in every movement, flung off her cloak, and skipped up to him with the lightness of a gazelle, and threw her arms round his neck, and kissed him. “Oh, uncle, I shall love you so! You are so like my darling—you have got his nose exactly, and just the same shaped legs. Oh, to think he should ever have left me!” And she burst into tears then and there before half a dozen servants. “Oh, Uncle Cradock, you have got a fine house; but I never shall get over it.” “Hush, my dear; come with me, my child!” Sir Cradock was always wide awake upon the subject of proprieties. “I am not your child; and I wonʼt be your child, if you try to stop me like that. I must cry when I want to cry, and it is so stupid to stop me.” “What a pretty dear you are!” said Sir Cradock, scarcely knowing what to say, but having trust in feminine vanity. “Am I indeed? I donʼt think so at all. I was very pretty, I know, until I began to cry so. But now my cheeks are come out, and my eyes gone in; but, oh dear! what does it matter, and my father never, never to take me on his lap again? Hya! Hya! Hya!” “Faix, thin, me darlinʼ,” cried Mrs. OʼGaghan, stroking her down in a shampoo manner, “itʼs meself as knows how to dale with you. Lave her to me; Sir Crayduck; sheʼs pure and parfict, every bit on her. I knows how to bring her out, and sheʼll come to your room like a lamb, now jist.—Git out of the way, the lot on you”—to several officious maidens—“me honey, put your hand in my neck, your blissed leetle dove of a hand, and fale how me heart goes pat for you. Sir Crayduck, me duty to you, but you might ‘ave knowed how to git out of the way, and lave the ladies to the ladies.” Sir Cradock Nowell marched away, thinking what a blessing it was that he had not had much to do with women. Then he reproached himself for the thought, as he remembered his darling Violet, the mother of his children. But, before he had brooded very long in the only room he liked to use now, his study just off from the library, a gentle knock came _to_ the door—as Biddy always expressed it—and Eoa, dressed in deepest mourning (made at Lymington, from her own frock, while she lay ill at the Crown), came up to him steadily, and kissed him, and sat on a stool at his feet. “Oh, uncle, I am so sorry,” she said, with her glorious hair falling over his knees, and her deep eyes looking up at him, “I am so sorry, Uncle Cradock, that I vexed you so, just now.”