"She has made you over to me. You are going to live in my house for the present, where you can carry on your studies better than you could at home, and I can attend to you better. Here you have been losing a month, because I did not know what you properly required. Are you willing to be my child, Rotha?--instead of Mrs. Busby's?--for a time?" The flash of joy in Rotha's eyes was so eloquent and so bright, that Mrs. Mowbray stooped down and kissed her. "I never was Mrs. Busby's child,"--the girl must make so much protest. "Well, no matter; you are not her child now. Lie still, and go to sleep if you can." Could she? Not at once. Is it possible to tell the sort of Elysium in which the child was lapped? Softness and warmth and ease and rest, and _hiding_, and such beauty and such luxury! Mrs. Mowbray left the room presently; and Rotha lay still under her affghan, looking from one to another point of delight in the room, wondering at this suddenly entered fairyland, comforted inexpressibly by the assurance that she was taken out of her aunt's house and presence, happy in the promise of the new guardianship into which she had come. What pretty pictures were on the walls, all around her, over her head; here was a lady, there a lovely little girl; here a landscape; there a large print shewing a horse which a smith is just about shoeing, and a little foal standing by. And so her eye wandered, from one to another, every one having its peculiar interest for Rotha. Then the books. How the books were piled up, on the floor, on the dressing-table, on benches, on the mantelpiece; there was a kind of overflow and breaking wave of literary riches which seemed to have scattered its surplus about this room. And there were trinkets too, and pretty useful trifles, and pretty things of use that were not trifles. Rotha had always lived in a very plain way; her father's house had shewed no far-off indication of this sort of life. Neither had her aunt's house. Plenty of means was not wanting there; the house had money enough; what it lacked was the life. No love of the beautiful; no habit of elegant surroundings; no literary taste that had any tide or flow whatsoever, much less overflow. No art, and no associations. Everything here had meaning, and indications of life, or associations with it; with mental life especially. What exactly it was that charmed her, Rotha could not have told; she could not have put all this into words; yet she felt all this. The girl had come into a new atmosphere, where for the first time her soul seemed to draw free breath. It was, by its affinities, her native air. Certainly in the company of Mr. Southwode all this higher part of her nature had been fed and fostered, and with him too she was at home; but she had seen him only in Mrs. Marble's house or in the lodgings at Fort Washington.