Don't you feel cold ?' 'No, nurse,' said Florence, laughing.

'Not at all.' 'Ah!' sighed Mrs Wickam, and she shook her head again, expressing to the watchful Berry, 'we shall be cold enough, some of us, by and by!' Berry took the frugal supper-tray, with which Mrs Wickam had by this time done, and bade her good-night.
'Good-night, Miss!' returned Wickam softly.

'Good-night! Your aunt is an old lady, Miss Berry, and it's what you must have looked for, often.' This consolatory farewell, Mrs Wickam accompanied with a look of heartfelt anguish; and being left alone with the two children again, and becoming conscious that the wind was blowing mournfully, she indulged in melancholy--that cheapest and most accessible of luxuries--until she was overpowered by slumber.
Although the niece of Mrs Pipchin did not expect to find that exemplary dragon prostrate on the hearth-rug when she went downstairs, she was relieved to find her unusually fractious and severe, and with every present appearance of intending to live a long time to be a comfort to all who knew her.

Nor had she any symptoms of declining, in the course of the ensuing week, when the constitutional viands still continued to disappear in regular succession, notwithstanding that Paul studied her as attentively as ever, and occupied his usual seat between the black skirts and the fender, with unwavering constancy.
But as Paul himself was no stronger at the expiration of that time than he had been on his first arrival, though he looked much healthier in the face, a little carriage was got for him, in which he could lie at his ease, with an alphabet and other elementary works of reference, and be wheeled down to the sea-side.

Consistent in his odd tastes, the child set aside a ruddy-faced lad who was proposed as the drawer of this carriage, and selected, instead, his grandfather--a weazen, old, crab-faced man, in a suit of battered oilskin, who had got tough and stringy from long pickling in salt water, and who smelt like a weedy sea-beach when the tide is out.
With this notable attendant to pull him along, and Florence always walking by his side, and the despondent Wickam bringing up the rear, he went down to the margin of the ocean every day; and there he would sit or lie in his carriage for hours together: never so distressed as by the company of children--Florence alone excepted, always.
'Go away, if you please,' he would say to any child who came to bear him company.