" It was a much more easy affair to give Miss Monro some
additional comforts; she was as cheerful as ever; still working away at
her languages in any spare time, but confessing that she was tired of the
perpetual teaching in which her life had been spent during the last
thirty years. Ellinor was now enabled to set her at liberty from this,
and she accepted the kindness from her former pupil with as much simple
gratitude as that with which a mother receives a favour from a child. "If
Ellinor were but married to Canon Livingstone, I should be happier than I
have ever been since my father died," she used to say to herself in the
solitude of her bed-chamber, for talking aloud had become her wont in the
early years of her isolated life as a governess. "And yet," she went on,
"I don't know what I should do without her; it is lucky for me that
things are not in my hands, for a pretty mess I should make of them, one
way or another. Dear! how old Mrs. Cadogan used to hate that word
'mess,' and correct her granddaughters for using it right before my face,
when I knew I had said it myself only the moment before! Well! those
days are all over now. God be thanked!"
In spite of being glad that "things were not in her hands" Miss Monro
tried to take affairs into her charge by doing all she could to persuade
Ellinor to allow her to invite the canon to their "little sociable teas.
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