The good creature! I could have hugged her in my girlish gratitude. The tea was a delicious treat, and put new heart into me. I was quite fresh and rested when I went into Dot's little room. He opened his eyes widely when he saw me. "Oh, Esther! is it really you, and not that ugly old Martha?" he cried out, joyfully. "I do hate her, to be sure. I will be a good boy, and you shall not have any trouble." And thereupon he fell to embracing me as though he would never leave off. CHAPTER XIV. PLAYING IN TOM TIDLER'S GROUND. We had had an old-fashioned winter--weeks of frost to delight the hearts of the young skaters of Milnthorpe; clear, cold bracing days, that made the young blood in our veins tingle with the sense of new life and buoyancy; long, dark winter evenings, when we sat round the clear, red fire, and the footsteps of the few passengers under our window rang with a sort of metallic sound on the frozen pavements. What a rush of cold air when the door opened, what snow-powdered garments we used to bring into Deborah's spotless kitchen! Dot used to shiver away from my kisses, and put up a little mittened hand to ward me off. "You are like a snow-woman, Essie," he would say. "Your face is as hard and cold and red as one of the haws Flurry brought me." "She looks as blooming as a rose in June," Uncle Geoffrey answered once, when he heard Dot's unflattering comparison. "Be off, lassie, and take off those wet boots;" but as I closed the door he added to mother, "Esther is improving, I think; she is less angular, and with that clear fresh color she looks quite bonnie." "Quite bonnie." Oh, Uncle Geoffrey, you little knew how that speech pleased me. Winter lasted long that year, and then came March, rough and boisterous and dull as usual, with its cruel east wind and the dust, "a peck of which was worth a king's ransom," as father used to say. Then came April, variable and bright, with coy smiles forever dissolving in tears; and then May in full blossom and beauty giving promise of summer days. We used to go out in the lanes, Flurry and I, to gather the spring flowers that Miss Ruth so dearly loved. We made a primrose basket once for her room, and many a cowslip ball for Dot, and then there were dainty little bunches of violets for mother and Carrie, only Carrie took hers to a dying girl in Nightingale lane.