On the previous day Leonard and Lucy, and Cuthbert, together with Mrs. Piggott and Priscilla Dobbin, had journeyed to town, and now Heather and her first-born were bringing up the rear of the Dudley domestic army. It was a great point that Heather should have nothing to attend to excepting Lally, that she should not be troubled with luggage or parcels, or anything besides the sick child; and all the others being gone before, was a relief to her, so as to obviate the necessity for conversation or movement, or stir or sound, likely to disturb the little girl. Mr. Plimpton, one of the most good-natured men who ever existed, saw Mrs. Dudley into her compartment, and impressed the guard with the importance of permitting no other passengers to intrude into it. “The child is very ill indeed,” he explained; which explanation he perhaps made clearer by slipping half-a-crown into the man’s hand. “I declare, if it were not that Lady Emily might wonder what had become of me, I would run up to town with you myself, Mrs. Dudley, and see you safe; but I think the guard will take care that no other passengers get in. Good-bye—good-bye, Miss Lally; don’t quite forget me, though you are going to live in London. Have you any message for my wife? she will be certain to inquire whether you sent her one.” “Lally’s love give her,” said the child, who was now all excitement at the bustle, and the noise, and the steam, and the number of the people, and the general variety,—“Lally’s love—and a tiss;” and she kissed the tall gentleman, spite of his bushy whiskers and bristling moustache, both articles which ordinarily tried her equanimity and temper not a little. “That child will never be better,” was Mr. Plimpton’s summary of Lally’s state on his return home. “They may take her where they like, and send for whom they like, but she will never be strong again. Poor Mrs. Dudley believes it to be a question of treatment, but I am confident no treatment will ever put the little creature to rights.” As for Miss Hope, she drove back to Berrie Down “crying like an idiot,” so she informed Agnes all the way. “Dear me, I wish people would not have children,” she said; “that Lally is enough to break a person’s heart. Why cannot she get strong as any other child would? I declare I am out of patience with her, month after month, and like a bag of bones at the end. And of all things on earth she must set up a lamentation for that Bessie, whom she ought to have forgotten long ago; asking her mother if they should see her in London, and whether she would not be with them always, and sing to her at night. As if Heather were not vexed enough and sad enough without that;” and Miss Hope tossed aside her bonnet, which Laura carried upstairs, for the spinster was going to stay with the girls for a time, to see how they went on and managed by themselves.