CHAPTER II.
IN WHICH I ENTER THE DEAWING-BOOM.
I was now approaching Brandon Hall; less than ten
minutes more would set me down at its door-steps. The
stiff figure of Mrs. Marston, the old housekeeper, pale
and austere, in rustling black silk (she was accounted a
miser, and estimated to have saved I dare not say how
much money in the Wylder family) — kind to me with
the bread-and-jam and Naples-biscuit-kindness of her
species, in old times — stood in fancy at the doorway.
She, too, was a dream, and, I dare say, her money spent
by this time. And that other dream, to which she often
led me, with the large hazel eyes, and clear delicate tints
— so sweet, so riante, yet so sad; poor Lady Mary Bran-
don, dying there —so unhappily mated — a young moth-
er, and her baby sleeping in long "broderie anglaise " at-
tire upon the pillow on the sofa, and whom she used to
show me with a peeping mystery, and her finger to her
smiling lip, and a gaiety and fondness in her pretty face.
That little helpless, groping, wailing creature was now
the Dorcas Brandon, the mistress of the old mansion and
all its surroundings, who was the heroine of the splendid
matrimonial compromise which was about to reconcile a
feud, and avert a possible lawsuit, and for one generation
at least, to tranquilize the troubled annals of the Bran-
dons and Wylders.
And now the ancient gray chapel, with its stained win-
dow, and store of old Brandon and Wylder monuments
among its solemn clump of elm-trees, flitted by on my
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