"Properly speaking, I was not at home just then, but on a visit to my
grandmother and a married aunt without children who lived with her. A
fever had broken out in my own home, and my visit here had been
prolonged to keep me out of the way of infection. I was very happy and
comfortable except for one single vexation, which was this:

"I slept on a little bed in what had once been the nursery, a large
room which was now used as a workroom. A great deal of sewing was done
in my grandmother's house, and the sewing-maid and at least one other
of the servants sat there every evening. A red silk screen was put
before my bed to shield me from the candlelight, and I was supposed
to be asleep when they came upstairs. But I never remember to have
been otherwise than wide awake, nervously awake, wearily awake. This
was the vexation. I was not a strong child, and had a very excitable
brain; and the torture that it was to hear those maids gossiping on
the other side of the dim red light of my screen I cannot well
describe, but I do most distinctly remember. I tossed till the clothes
got hot, and threw them off till I got cold, and stopped my ears, and
pulled the sheet over my face, and tried not to listen, and listened
in spite of all. They told long stories, and made many jokes that I
couldn't understand; sometimes I heard names that I knew, and fancied
I had learnt some wonderful secret. Sometimes, on the contrary, I made
noises to intimate that I was awake, when one of them would rearrange
my glaring screen, and advise me to go to sleep; and then they talked
in whispers, which was more distracting still.

"One evening--some months after my ramble round the manor--the maids
went out to tea, and I lay in peaceful silence watching the shadows
which crept noiselessly about the room as the fire blazed, and wishing