sunshine. Malcolm, who loaded her with presents, had himself
selected the handsomely framed prints that adorned the walls; his
favourite "Huguenot," and "The Black Brunswicker," and Luke Fildes's
"Doctor," and some of Leader's landscapes, had their places there.
In this room Anna spent her leisure hours, few and far between as
they were; here she read and thought and wrote her letters to
Malcolm--sweet, maidenly letters, which he read lightly and tossed
aside with a smile, not unkindly, but with the preoccupied
carelessness of a busy man.

The sound of their voices brought Dawson to the door. She was a
little pincushiony woman, with bunched-up gray curls, which she wore
in defiance of all prevailing fashions, and of which she was
secretly very proud;. her complexion was still as clear and pink as
a girl's; and her somewhat wide mouth was garnished by the whitest
of teeth. It was Dawson's boast that she had never sat in a
dentist's chair in her life.

"I am sixty-five if I am a day," she would say, with a quick little
birdlike nod that always emphasised her statements; "but there,
mother was eighty-three when the palsy took her, and she hadn't a
gap in her mouth, dear soul."

Malcolm always kissed his old nurse, for there was a warm attachment
between them; and indeed he never forgot that he had owed all his
childish comfort to her.

"Blessed is he who expecteth nothing," observes the wise man, and
Malcolm, who had indulged in moderate expectations in which the
teapot loomed largely, was somewhat surprised by the agreeable sight