'You are going to carry out your old scheme, Ursula, about nursing poor people and singing to them.

He tells me you have chosen Heathfield for your future home, and that he is to find you lodgings.

Sit down, dear, and tell me all about it,' she went on eagerly.

'I thought you had given up all that when--when--' but here she stopped and her lips trembled; of course she meant when Charlie died, but she rarely spoke his name.

I would not let her see my astonishment,--she had never seemed so sisterly before,--but I took the seat close to her and talked to her as openly as though she were Jill or Uncle Max; now and then I paused, and we could hear Colonel Ferguson's deep voice: he was evidently turning over the pages of Sara's music.
'Go on, Ursula; I like to hear it,' Lesbia would say when I hesitated; she was not looking at me, but at the fire, with her cheek supported against her hand.
'What do you think of it ?' I asked, presently, when I had finished and we had both been silent a few minutes listening to one of Mendelssohn's Songs without Words that Sara was playing very nicely.
'What do I think of it ?' she replied, and her voice startled me, it was so full of pain.