"There you lie till afternoon," said she. "My boy left orders before
he went out that such should be the case, and I can assure you my son
is master and must be obeyed. Presently you shall have breakfast."
Presently she brought that meal--brought it with her own active hands
--not leaving me to servants. She seated herself on the bed while I
ate. Now it is not everybody, even amongst our respected friends and
esteemed acquaintance, whom we like to have near us, whom we like to
watch us, to wait on us, to approach us with the proximity of a nurse
to a patient. It is not every friend whose eye is a light in a sick
room, whose presence is there a solace: but all this was Mrs. Bretton
to me; all this she had ever been. Food or drink never pleased me so
well as when it came through her hands. I do not remember the occasion
when her entrance into a room had not made that room cheerier. Our
natures own predilections and antipathies alike strange. There are
people from whom we secretly shrink, whom we would personally avoid,
though reason confesses that they are good people: there are others
with faults of temper, &c., evident enough, beside whom we live
content, as if the air about them did us good. My godmother's lively
black eye and clear brunette cheek, her warm, prompt hand, her self-
reliant mood, her decided bearing, were all beneficial to me as the
atmosphere of some salubrious climate. Her son used to call her "the
old lady;" it filled me with pleasant wonder to note how the alacrity
and power of five-and-twenty still breathed from her and around her.
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