For my own part,
I have often noticed that when I have been ill, and have been getting
better, I have refused to acknowledge it, and that it has been an
effort to me to say that things were not at their worst. She,
however, had none of this niggardly baseness, and always, if only for
the sake of her friends, took the cheerful side. Mrs. Taylor now
left us. She left us a friend whose friendship will last, I hope, as
long as life lasts. She had seen all our troubles and our poverty:
we knew that she knew all about us: she had helped us with the most
precious help--what more was there necessary to knit her to us?--and
it is worth noting that the assistance which she rendered, and her
noble self-sacrifice, so far from putting us, in her opinion, in her
debt, only seemed to her a reason why she should be more deeply
attached to us.
It was late in the autumn before Ellen had thoroughly recovered, but
at last we said that she was as strong as she was before, and we
determined to celebrate our deliverance by one more holiday before
the cold weather came. It was again Sunday--a perfectly still, warm,
autumnal day, with a high barometer and the gentlest of airs from the
west. The morning in London was foggy, so much so that we doubted at
first whether we should go; but my long experience of London fog told
me that we should escape from it with that wind if we got to the
chalk downs away out by Letherhead and Guildford.
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