the hour he was back with the doctor, whose looks were grave as he examined his patient.
"There is hope, doctor?" said Mrs. Farebrother's sister. "Tell me there is hope!"
He shook his head, and gently told her she must prepare for the worst.
"She is past prescribing for," he said. "I can do nothing for her. She has been for some time in a decline."
The sentence being passed, she had no room in her heart for any other feeling than pity for her dying sister. In the sunrise, when the sweet air was infusing strength into fresh young life, the end came. Mrs. Farebrother whispered to her sister that she wished to speak to her husband alone. Thoroughly awed, he sat by her side. She made no reference to the past; she uttered no reproaches. She spoke only of their child, and begged him to be good to her. He promised all that she asked of him.
"You will get some good woman into the house to take care of her?" she said.
"Yes; I promise."
"And my sister must see her whenever she wishes to do so."
"Yes."
"And when our dear one is old enough and strong enough you will let her go to my sister, and stop with her a little now and then? It will do her good to mix with children of her own age."
"Yes; I promise."
"As you deal by her, so will you be dealt by. May Heaven prosper you in all worthy undertakings! Kiss me. Let there be peace and forgiveness between us."
He kissed her, and sat a little apart while she and her sister, their cheeks nestling, exchanged their last words.
"Look after my treasure," whispered the mother.
"I will, dear, as tenderly and carefully as if she were one of my own."
"You must come here and see her sometimes; he has promised that you may; and when she grows up you will let her come to you?"
"She will always be lovingly welcome. My home is hers if she should ever need one."
"God bless you! May your life be prosperous and ever happy!"
Before noon she drew her last breath, and Parksides was without a mistress.
CHAPTER IV.
PHŒBE AND THE ANGELS.
It did not long remain so. In less than a fort-night after Mrs. Farebrother's death a housekeeper was installed in Parksides. Her name was Mrs. Pamflett, and her age thirty. Being called "Mrs.," the natural inference was that she was either wife or widow; but as no questions were put to her on this point there were none to answer, and it certainly did not appear to be anybody's business but her own. Miser Farebrother, being entirely wrapped up in his money-bags, gave the entire household into the care of Mrs. Pamflett, one of its items being the motherless child Phœbe. A capable housekeeper, thrifty, careful, and willing to work, Miser Farebrother was quite satisfied with her performance of her duties; but she was utterly unfit to rear a child so young as Phœbe, for whom, it must be confessed, she had no particular love, and Phœbe would have fared badly in many ways had it not been for her aunt.
Mrs. Lethbridge lived in London, in the not very aristocratic neighbourhood of Camden Town. She and Phœbe's mother had been married on the same day—one to a man whose miserly habits were unknown, and had, indeed, not at that time grown into a confirmed disease; the other to a bank clerk, who was expected to keep up the appearance of a gentleman, and fitly rear and educate a family, upon a salary of a hundred and eighty pounds a year. Fortunately for him and his wife, their family was not numerous, consisting of one son and one daughter. With Miser Farebrother they had nothing in common; he so clearly and unmistakably discouraged their attempts to cement an affectionate or even a friendly intimacy that they had gradually and surely dropped away from each other. This was a great grief to the sisters, but the edict issued by Miser Farebrother was not to be disputed.
"I will not allow your sister or her husband to come to the house," he had said to his wife when, in the early days of their married life, she remonstrated with him; later on she had not the courage or the spirit to expostulate against his harsh decrees, to which she submitted with a breaking heart. "They are a couple of busybodies, and you can tell them so if you please, with my compliments."
Mrs. Farebrother did not tell her sister what her husband called them, but she wrote and said that for the sake of peace they had better not come to see her. The Lethbridges mournfully acquiesced; indeed, they had no alternative: they could not force themselves into the house of a man who would not receive them.
"But if we can't go to her," said Mrs. Lethbridge, "Laura"—which was Mrs. Farebrother's Christian name—"can come to us."
This, also, after a little while, Miser Farebrother would not allow.
"I will not," he said, "have my affairs talked about by people who are not friendly to me."
"That is your fancy," said Mrs. Farebrother; "they would be very happy if you would allow them to be friendly."
"Of course," he sneered, "so that they could poke their heads into my business. I tell you I will not have it."
She sighed, and submitted; and thereafter, when she and her sister met, it was by appointment in a strange place. Even these rare meetings, upon their being discovered, were prohibited, and thus Miser Farebrother succeeded in parting two sisters who loved each other devotedly.
"Whatever Laura saw in that miserly bear," said Mrs. Lethbridge, indignantly, to her husband, "to marry him is a mystery I shall never be able to discover."
But this mystery is of a nature common enough in the matrimonial market, and may be attributed to thousands of ill-assorted couples.
It was plainly Miser Farebrother's intention to discourage Mrs. Lethbridge's visits to Parksides after the death of his wife; promises were in no sense sacred to him, even death-bed promises, unless their performance was necessary to his interests, and in this instance he very soon decided that it was not.
"You perceive," he said to Mrs. Lethbridge, "that I have a housekeeper to look after the child. You are giving yourself a deal of unnecessary trouble trudging down here—for what? To ascertain whether she is properly dressed? You see she is. Whether she has enough to eat? She looks well enough, doesn't she? Don't you think you had better devote yourself to your own domestic affairs instead of prying into mine? Your husband must be very rich that you can afford to pay railway fares and cab fares to come to a house where you are not wanted."
This, in effect, was the sum of his efforts to prevent her from visiting Parksides; and his sneers and slighting allusions, made from time to time, were successful in curtailing her visits to his house during the young childhood of little Phœbe. They were not successful, however, in putting a stop to them altogether, until Phœbe was fourteen years of age, from which time her intercourse with her relatives was maintained by the young girl's visits to Camden Town—happy visits, lasting seldom less than two or three days. Until Phœbe was fourteen, her aunt came down to Parksides only once in every three months. Occasionally Mrs. Lethbridge caught a glimpse of Miser Farebrother, whose welcome, if he gave her one at all, was of the surliest; and as between her
