But now, from some unexplained feeling, Johanna in her convalescence longed after the boy--no longer a boy, however, but nearly twenty, and looking fully his age.

How proud his aunts were to march him up the town, and hear every body's congratulations on his good looks and polished manners! It was the old story--old as the hills! I do not pretend to invent any thing new.

Women, especially maiden aunts, will repeat the tale till the end of time, so long as they have youths belonging to them on whom to expend their natural tendency to clinging fondness, and ignorant, innocent hero worship.
The Misses Leaf--ay, even Selina, whose irritation against the provoking boy was quite mollified by the elegant young man--were no wiser than their neighbors.
But there was one person in the household who still obstinately refused to bow the knee to Ascott.

Whether it was, as psychologists might explain, some instinctive polarity in their natures; or whether, having once conceived a prejudice, Elizabeth held on to it like grim death; still there was the same unspoken antagonism between them.

The young fellow took little notice of her except to observe "that she hadn't grown any handsomer;' but Elizabeth watched him with a keen severity that overlooked nothing, and resisted, with a passive pertinacity that was quite irresistible, all his encroachments on the family habits, all the little self-pleasing ways which Ascott had been so used to of old, that neither he nor his aunts apparently recognized them as selfish.
"I canna bear to see him" ("can not," suggested her mistress, who not seeing any reason why Elizabeth should not speak the Queen's English as well as herself, had instituted h's, and stopped a few more glaring provincialisms.) "I cannot bear to see him, Miss Hilary, lolling on the arm-chair, when Missis looks so tired and pale, and sitting up o' nights, burning double fires, and going up stairs at last with his boots on, and waking every body.