The Argosy — page 278: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

The White Witch. 253 And you lying on a sick-bed and ought to be preparing yourself for ‘heaven ; but it’s little you'll see of that, Master Godfrey, if you keep your thoughts fixed so much on the other. Instead of bearing a little pain asa Christian should, you—-What ? Gone away and left you, has she? No, she hasn’t; she’s sitting beside you all the time.—Saw her with him in the cab? Good gracious, who are you talking about ? Don’t think any more about her, then, she isn’t worth it. And what’s her beauty worth if she’s so bad? I’mashamed to sit and hear you go on, sir.” But Dunning nursed him indefatigably all the same; and when he _ apostrophised her in terms to which she was not accustomed, and implored her to kiss him, she swooped upon him and gave him a quick little peck with a glimmer in her sharp eyes which did not make her look any sweeter, but which, nevertheless, signified that there was nothing she could refuse to the boy whom she had smacked and soaped and made to say his prayers twenty years ago. The exertion of body when he was not ina state to bear it, added to his mental perplexity and torment, had been too much for Godfrey Mayne. His recognition of Mr. Cattermole had served to upset what little equanimity was left to him ; and the doubt racking him now was —whether Mary was with him by mutual arrangement, or whether Cattermole had exercised his power, as a detective, to compel it. He remembered that Mary had been going away with him from Croxham of her own free will, as she had taken care to assure Godfrey: and now that Godfrey saw him as he was—a young and good-looking man—he knew not what to think, except that he was all the more dangerous. With all this making havoc of his brain, Godfrey was not likely to lie like a lamb under the ministrations of his aunt and the injunctions of Dunning. But the night passed better than it had begun, and towards morning he fell asleep. In a few days the fever had subsided, and Godfrey began to get well. Dunning, from being a devoted nurse, became a tyrant, claiming the privilege of an old servant to read aloud to him passages selected by herself from religious works that she found in Lady Ann North- stone’s library and in her own, which she judged suitable to the case of a young man whose mind was certainly in a far from healthy state. Her mistress was aghast at this liberty, for although she prayed con- stantly that her darling nephew might be led to think more seriously of sacred things, she would never have dared to open the subject un- asked with him, still less to storm him with extracts from ‘‘ Steps and Stages on the Road to Glory,” and to pause impressively and glare at him with penetrating fixity, as Dunning took upon herself to do, whenever she came to a passage which she thought particularly ap- plicable. Mrs. Penteith was sorry to see, too, that Godfrey took a questicn- able pleasure in these readings, and even indulged Dunning with a Gomichboo (E(©) m