you think, aunt,’ said I, after some further contemplation of the fire, ‘that you could advise and counsel Dora a little, for our mutual advantage, now and then?’

‘Trot,’ returned my aunt, with some emotion, ‘no! Don’t ask me such a thing.’

Her tone was so very earnest that I raised my eyes in surprise.

‘I look back on my life, child,’ said my aunt, ‘and I think of some who are in their graves, with whom I might have been on kinder terms.

If I judged harshly of other people’s mistakes in marriage, it may have been because I had bitter reason to judge harshly of my own. Let that pass. I have been a grumpy, frumpy, wayward sort of a woman, a good many years. I am still, and I always shall be. But you and I have done one another some good, Trot, —