"It's a burning shame!" broke forth Honour, sitting down by the nursery fire and dashing the coals about with the poker, while she held Benja to her with the other hand--"it's a burning shame that he should be so treated! If she does turn me away, I'll go every step of the way to Castle Wafer and tell all I know to your guardian, Benja. If I don't do it, may Heaven never prosper me!" Poor little ill-treated child! He lay there in her lap, smarting with the pain, his trembling heart beating. "Let the worst come to the worst, my precious lamb, it can only be for a few years," began Honour again. "I know it said in my master's will that you were to be sent early to Eton." "What's Eton?" sobbed Benja. "Something very good," rejoined Honour, who had no definite ideas on the subject herself. "And when you are of age, my darling, all Alnwick will be yours, and she and Master Georgy must turn out of it." "Where will they go?" asked Benja. "I don't know where, and it don't matter where," continued the woman in her injudicious partisanship. "You will be master at Alnwick, and nobody can live here then unless you choose to let them." "Who is master now?" questioned Benja. "You are, my pretty boy, and have been ever since your papa died; only she lives, in it and gives orders because you are not old enough. Master's wits must have gone a wool-gathering," added the exasperated Honour in soliloquy, "when he left her with any power over the child at all." Honour was right in the main. Benja remained on her lap, his sobs gradually subsiding. He lay thinking of many things, such as occur to children, his ideas running from one topic to another. Presently he spoke. "Honour, when is my church to be finished?" "Suppose I finish it this afternoon," cried Honour, starting up. "There's scarcely anything left of it to do, and if I am turned away it may never get done at all." Opening a closet-door, she took from it what seemed to be the model of a very pretty country church, with its spire, begun in pursuance of her promise to Benja after the visit to the "Emporium of Foreign Curiosities." Like many another thing entered upon in haste, this coveted treasure had not yet been completed. The fact was, Honour found more trouble over it than she had anticipated, and Benja, in the protracted waiting, forgot his eagerness, All that was left to be done now was the pasting on of the coloured windows. They were cut out of thin rose paper; the walls of the structure being of thicker paper and white, and the framework of thin wood. Honour collected her materials, and soon accomplished her task, though she had not been sparing of her windows. Benja forgot his troubles in watching her. She had taken off his velvet dress, with many a lamentation over the rent, and put on him a brown-holland tunic, handsomely trimmed with black silk braid. Over that she tied a white pinafore, lest he should make too free acquaintance with the paste.