32 A YEAR WITH NELLIE.

her. It was a great delight when the servant
who had taken up the flowers came back to
the door with a different message to that she
generally brought. This time it was: “Miss
Alice is a little better, and you are to go up
and see her.”

She was lying on a sofa, looking very pale
and thin; but when she had kissed the brother
and sister, and talked to them for a while in
her old kind voice, they went away happier
than they had felt for weeks.

CHAPTER V.
A THUNDERSTORM.

HE summer had come and gone without
anything particular coming to pass in
Milbury. Harry had passed his seventh birth-
day, and was beginning to think that he was
growing up at last and would soon be a man.
Nellie had hardly grown at all, but she was
thirteen, and could not understand why her
father and mother still looked upon her as a