However, for fear of any rashness about that, I led her with a smooth and easy pace—for she could move beautifully with my arm round her, which no clumsy girl could do—to a snug little nook, where a large bay tree broke the power of the wind, and screened the snow. Here we found a low branch upon which we could sit, with the fragrant leaves to shelter us; and ever since that when I smell a bayleaf, I can never help thinking of my love, even when it is in pickled mackerel. When I had told her a thousand times of my delight at finding her, and she, with a hundred blushes perhaps, had begged me to show it judiciously, I asked where she had been in such dreadful weather, and what she had got in the basket. “Two bottles of brandy,” she answered as coolly as if it had been a cowslip ball; “from the Bricklayers’ Arms I had to fetch them, because nobody else would go out in the storm.” “What!” I cried, looking at her pure and bashful eyes, “do you mean to say that you are sent alone to a common public-house, where the navvies go?” “Oh, they never say anything to me, dear Kit. But I cannot bear to go, when there are noisy people there. And I believe that my father would be angry if he knew it. It has only happened once or twice, when the weather was very bad.” “Does she ever send her own daughters there?” I asked as mildly as I could, for Kitty was trembling at my natural wrath, and stern manner. “Oh no! She would not like to send them at all, even if they would go, which is very doubtful. But she says that my place is to be useful; and she never can do without brandy long. She gets tired of wine in the evening.” “The case is just this,” I said, wishing to let off my wrath, that I might speak of more pleasant things; “she revels upon your father’s money, and squanders it on her children’s whims; she locks him up in a corner of his own house, makes a slave of his only child, starves and beats her, and degrades her by sending her for drink to a pot-house. A young lady—the best, and the sweetest, and noblest—” I was obliged to stop, in fear of violence. But my dear one became all the dearer to me, as I thought of her misery and patience. If my Uncle Cornelius tried to “put upon” me, was I ever known to put up with it? And consider the difference betwixt an uncle, who fed me, and kept me, and allowed me money—or at any rate promised to do so—and a vile stepmother, who ruined the father, and starved and bullied and disgraced the child! Truly we learn to forget right and wrong; as our country has learned in these latter days.