Page:Romance & Reality 2.pdf/142

140 and lighted boudoir; and every gust served as an excuse for shrinking still farther into the warm crimson cushions of the arm-chairs they had drawn almost into the fire. They had no new books; Emily was still too weak for work or music; and it was just the most confidential and conversational evening in the world. Confidence is made up of confession and remembrances; we all love to talk of the days of our youth; and, almost before she was aware, Lady Mandeville was engaged in a sort of autobiography of herself. It would do, she said, as well as reading aloud, to send her patient to sleep. "I am going to enact the heroine of a narrative, though sadly deficient in all the necessary requisites. Save one, I have never had a misfortune happen to me—I have never been in such extremes of poverty that I have been obliged to sell even the ruby cross hung round my neck by my mysterious mother—or the locket which contained two braids of hair, one raven black, the other golden, the first love-pledge of my unfortunate parents—I have never had a fever, during which my lover watched every look of my benevolent physician—I have never been given over, and then, after a profound sleep,