The good soul told endless tales of her darling's childhood, his frolics and beauty.

To-day was uncertain to her, but the past was still bright and clear.

As they sat prattling together over the bright tea-table, attended by the trim little maid, whose services the Colonel's bounty secured for his old nurse, the kind old creature insisted on having Clive by her side.

Again and again she would think he was actually her own boy, forgetting, in that sweet and pious hallucination, that the bronzed face, and thinned hair, and melancholy eyes of the veteran before her, were those of her nursling of old days.

So for near half the space of man's allotted life he had been absent from her, and day and night wherever he was, in sickness or health, in sorrow or danger, her innocent love and prayers had attended the absent darling.