CHAPTER II
THE NEPHEW
'Hers is a spirit deep and crystal clear:
Calmly beneath her earnest face it lies,
Free without boldness, meek without a fear,
Quicker to look than speak its sympathies.'—LOWELL.
s Betty Wyndham had said, she and Angel were not very well off for relations. Angelica's memory held some faint, faraway pictures of mother and father, which she had dreamt over so often that they were always fair and tender like the hazy distance of an autumn landscape. Dimly, too, she could recollect the time of loss and loneliness and half-understood grief when she cried herself to sleep at night for want of the familiar kisses, and she had hazy remembrances of strange faces and changes, and a time when the cottage by Oakfield Common was a new home, and Cousin Amelia Crayshaw, the elderly relation, with whom she and Betty were to live (and who had died two years before this story begins), was a stranger—a rather alarming stranger, so unlike mamma, that it seemed unnatural to go to her for things, and ask her questions, and say the Catechism to her on Sunday.
And there was one other recollection which Angel had thought of and talked to Betty about so often, that it made quite a landmark in her life: the recollection of a day in that dreary time when she sat, a little lonely, frightened child, only dimly understanding the meaning of her black frock, by the cradle where baby Betty was asleep, crying in a hushed, awed way, as much at the grave faces and the drawn blinds as because papa and mamma had gone away, for they must surely come back by-and-bye.