"Pretty in Italy!" said the old lady indignantly. "I fancy, Miss Aveline, the gentlemen must be much changed since my time, if you are not thought pretty anywhere."
"Oh, hush, nurse!" said Aveline lifting up her finger. "It is only safe to tell little children they are pretty. Grown up ones are too ready to believe it."
"It is little matter here, Miss Aveline," said the old woman. "You have no neighbours."
"No neighbours, nurse? I was but waiting until we had finished tea to ask you about them all. How is the good old widow by the church—and Mrs. Wood, the baker—and young Mrs. Wood at the post-office? And Harding, the carpenter—and the fisherman's family on the other side of the cliff? Is little Jane as pretty as ever? Of course not. Her father I know has cut all her curls off, as he always does, and she is beginning to lose her teeth; so that she will not be fit to look at for these ten years."
While she was talking on in this lively manner, the old woman kept her eyes fixed on her face with a serious and anxious expression.
Aveline was fearfully thin; her hands, which she used in speaking, more than an English woman, were almost transparent; and from fatigue, the blue veins had risen over them in every direction. The colour in her cheeks was fixed like a bright spot of rouge under each eye, giving a brilliancy that was almost fierce in its expression to eyes that were dark as night, and remarkable for their size.
Mrs. Fitzpatrick, who followed the nurse's looks with an eagerness that she could scarcely repress, caught her eye and remained silent, fixing her gaze upon the old woman's countenance with an intensity that she could hardly sustain. It seemed as if she ardently desired to read the nurse's opinion of her child, but was equally anxious that she should not then express it.
"Well, nurse," said Aveline, "what news? I hope all these good people are not dead, that you keep such a profound silence upon their proceedings."
"All pretty much as you left them, Miss Aveline," said the nurse, rousing herself from her contemplation. "I cannot speak positively with respect to the beauty of the fisherman's children; though I always see three or four curly heads round his door when I pass. He lost one poor little one in the winter with the whooping cough. The neighbours said it was a mercy, as he had such a large family, but I don't know that the parents felt the less on that account."
"Poor people!" said Aveline. "I'll tell you what, mamma, I shall get up early to-morrow, and go down to the cottage with Susan, and buy some prawns for breakfast; and then I shall see what the children would like as a present. I am always so glad when people are in want of nice clean little straw bonnets. There is nothing romantic in giving away flannel petticoats or thick worsted stockings."