“Frederick. I like his name. I cannot remember the other names. I never have been used to see so many people,” said Innocent, at length bursting into speech after her long silence. She could speak to this woman, who was a servant, but she did not understand the ladies in their pretty dresses, who oppressed her with their kindness. “Shall I have to see them every day?” she continued, with a dismal tone in her voice. The corners of her mouth drooped. At this thought she was ready to cry again. “Go to your bed,” said Alice authoritatively. “If I thought you knew what you were saying, my bonnie woman, I would like to put you to the door. The creature’s no a changeling, for it says its prayers,” she added to herself, when she had extinguished the candles, and left the stranger in her chamber; “but here’s a bonnie handful for the mistress,” Alice went on, talking to herself while she arranged Mrs. Eastwood’s room for the night, “and plenty of mischief begun already. She’s no like her mother, which is a comfort: but there’s ane that is.” Nobody heard these oracular mutterings, however, and nobody in the house knew as much as Alice did, who had no thought in the world but the Eastwoods, and kept her mental life up by diligently putting one thing to another, and keeping watch and ward over the children she had nursed. It was common in the Elms to say that Alice was “a character;” but I do not think any of them had the least idea how distinct and marked her character was, or how deeply aware she was of the various currents which were shaping unconsciously the life of the “family.” She was nearly ten years older than Mrs. Eastwood, and had brought her up as well as her daughter, commencing life as a nursery-maid in the house of her present mistress’s father, when Mrs. Eastwood was six or seven years old, and her young attendant sixteen. She knew everything, and more than everything, that had taken place in the family since; more than everything, for Alice in her private musings had thought out the mingled story, and divined everybody’s motives, as, perhaps, they scarcely divined them themselves. She had married, when she was thirty, the gardener who took charge of a shooting-box in Scotland, which belonged to Admiral Forbes, the Eastwoods’ grandfather, but had been absent from them only about two years, returning at her husband’s death to accompany them to Italy, and to settle down afterwards into the personal attendant and superintendent of her young lady’s married life. She knew all about them; she knew how it was that the old Admiral had made his second marriage, and how his second daughter, Isabel, had developed by the side of her more innocent and simple sister. She recollected a great deal more about Innocent’s father and mother than Mrs. Eastwood herself did--more than it was at all expedient or profitable to recollect. And it was not only the past that occupied her mind; she understood the