Annie and Dora remained silent, looking at the intruders in a peculiar manner. At the same time the first pair did not tell the second more or less curtly, as the elder girls had been in the habit of doing not so very long ago, to go away and leave grown-up people to finish important discussions in peace.

What other new thing could have come about? Was there a fresh wooer in the field, a second offer of marriage to be laid at reluctant feet? Was it Annie, their beauty, who was in request this time? Who was the lover? not Cyril Carey, with his plush waistcoat and gold chains and odious snuff-box? He had no means of keeping a wife, unless his father took him into partnership in the bank, and their father would not hear of Cyril; besides, Annie held him in supreme disdain. She had more patience with Tom Robinson and "the shop" than with the nineteenth century dandy, whom she pronounced a mistaken revival of one of the many curiosities of Queen Anne's reign.

But Rose and May had no certainty that Annie was the object of pursuit. She was pretty enough, they had all pinned their faith to her beauty, yet already Dora had been preferred before her, though it was only by the head of "Robinson's." Was it possible that now it might be Rose, unsuspecting, unconsulted? Could her own mother and sisters be so unfair as to arrogate to themselves the settlement of her affairs without her consent or knowledge, without so much as admitting her into the conclave?

Annie took the initiative, she was sufficiently quick to see both behind and before her. She had a head for directing and managing which her mother did not possess.

"Mother, don't you see they had better be told at once?" she said, with the aplomb of a girl who, however young and irresponsible, is capable of arriving at independent conclusions and reversing existing conditions. "They are, as Rose says, all but grown up; indeed not so very much younger than Dora and I. I think Rose and May are entitled to be told."

Annie was proceeding to act upon the permission implied in her mother's nod. She was not without some small sense of personal importance in being the mouthpiece which was to announce the calamity to her younger sisters. She did it in a very different fashion from that in which their mother had broken the news to her and Dora.

"What we are going to speak to you about is not a thing that can be long concealed. It will not be a secret for more than a few days, if for so long. But that does not mean that you are not to shut this room door which you have left wide open. Thanks, May. Don't bang it! You are not to show that you know what is going to happen. And, after it has happened, you are not to chatter about it before the servants or to your companions. We are trusting you because you have almost come to the years of discretion, and ought to have a notion how to behave under the circumstances."

"Well, this is too bad of you, Annie!" cried Rose, showing instant symptoms of revolt. "What have May and I done that we should be spoken to as if we were a pair of tell-tales, or babies—and geese into the bargain? Dora and you are not so much older, as you confess; neither are you so much wiser with all your pretensions. If something of so much consequence to everybody is on the eve of happening, I think we might have been told before. Surely mother is not afraid that we should repeat anything which we ought not to mention," and she glanced with burning reproach at her mother.

Rose was both high-spirited and touchy. She was not disposed to play the second part without a murmur like Dora. She was not content, with her art as a balance to Annie's beauty and May's budding scholarship. Rose desired everybody to acknowledge her mother-wit and trustworthiness.

Dora and Mrs. Millar spoke together in reply. "Mother only told Annie and me this afternoon," said the general peacemaker.

"It was not such a pleasant piece of information for me to give, or you to receive, child, that you and May should grudge my keeping it from you as long as I could, as I dared," was the mother's weary reply. "Besides, your father did not wish it spoken about before; it would have been wrong, a great risk to many others as well as to ourselves, to have mentioned such a thing."

"Then don't tell us now if you don't care to, mother, and if father disapproves of our hearing it," said Rose magnanimously, for she was dying to be at the bottom of the mystery.

"No, don't, mother dear, please don't, if it will hurt you," said May affectionately, with something of a childish ring in her voice. Her mother took her hand at the words and clasped it tightly.

"Mother has made up her mind and father has given her leave to speak," said Annie with determination, "because you must hear soon anyhow. There is something wrong with the bank, Mr. Carey's bank. We have all, even May, read and heard of bank failures, and have some idea how disastrous they are."

"The Carey's bank!" cried Rose, with sufficient intelligence in her astonishment. "I understand now why we were not to go home with Ella and Phyllis."

"Then somebody must run over and tell them that we are not coming," interrupted May. "Do let Bella take the message, mother, in case I should look as if I knew something. Poor Mr. Carey! he was always so kind to us. I am so sorry; but the bank has not anything to do with us; father is not the banker, he is just a doctor like grandfather," ended May composedly.

"O May, you are a baby, though you read the Greek Testament and have something to say to Tacitus in the original," exclaimed Annie indignantly.

"Your father has shares in the bank, my dear," explained her mother with patient reiteration. "He bought them with his savings, and he will get nothing for them. Nobody will buy them from him again, they will be no better than waste paper. But that is not the worst. The shares make him responsible for the bank's debts—I am sure I cannot tell you how far; he told me, I daresay, but I was so grieved for him and for all of you, and so confused, I could not take it in. But he says that what he will have to pay up will be as much as he can do, with a hard fight, for the rest of his days."

"I am so sorry for father," murmured May in an awed tone, but with a little of a parrot note, just as she had pitied Mr. Carey, who was only an old acquaintance and the father of her friends. The fact was that the young girl, brought away suddenly from her girlish interests and her whole past experience, and plunged into the cares of older people, was thoroughly staggered and bewildered, in spite of a small head which was capable of construing Latin and conjugating Greek.

There was a moment's pause. "Will it make a great difference to father and the rest of us?" asked Rose, in spite of her quickness, and in spite of what her mother had said.

"Certainly," Annie took it upon her to answer, with a mixture of fire and conviction, "we'll all have to earn our living."

"Oh, don't make such sweeping statements, Annie, frightening your sisters," said their mother reproachfully; and unquestionably May looked scared, and dropped her gloves without noticing it. "You must do what you can to help your poor dear father, and I am sure you'll do that willingly, but so long as he is spared to work for all of us——" She stopped short, unable to say any more.

Then her daughters closed round her, from the youngest to the eldest, and told her in concert that she was not to be concerned for them. They were ready for the occasion and equal to it, and they would not mind in the very least.

"Mind!" declared Rose, with her eyes beginning to shine and her cheeks to flush like Annie's. "Why, it is the one great comfort that we'll have to make our way in the world, and push our fortunes like boys. We'll have plenty of adventures and rise triumphant over them all, and be such a help to you and father. Think of that, May, you little coward," appealing to her younger sister who, in spite of her small dabbling in masculine acquirements, did not look as if the prospect of pushing her fortune like a boy was full of unmixed charm for her. But she brightened up at the visionary honour and delight of being a great help to their father and mother, and cried, "Yes, yes, Rose," with subdued enthusiasm.

Dora also echoed the "yes" with a quiet intensity.

Annie, on her part, graciously approved of her juniors, and rewarded them by patronizing them tremendously.

"That is right. I don't very well know yet what Dora and I can do, but we'll find something. However, you two young ones are the geniuses of the family, and we'll look to you. I suspect Dora and I will have to march under your wings. You, Rose, must be quick and paint Academy pictures, get them hung on the line, and have them sold before the opening day. May must pass all her examinations in no time, gain a scholarship, and be appointed classical mistress to a Girls' Day-school, of which she will eventually become the head. Fancy 'little May' a full-blown school ma'am."

"Dear! what creatures girls are! They are jesting and laughing already over their own and other people's misfortunes. It is little they know of life, it is little they guess what will befall them," sighed Mrs. Millar to herself. Nevertheless, in the middle of her anxiety and sorrow, she was in some respects a happy woman, and she had a dim but consoling perception of the truth.



CHAPTER VI.

THE CLOUD DEEPENS.

The storm burst, but the cloud did not disperse, it only closed in more darkly over Redcross. At the same time, as the bank authorities had foreseen, there was little or nothing of the wild, panic-stricken run on the capital which heralds and intensifies many a bank's fall. The losers went about their ordinary occupations. The Rector preached, presided over meetings of the vestry and Christian Associations, and attended to his sick. Doctor Millar looked after his sick. Colonel Russell even went to the Literary Institute and read the newspapers as usual. Every one of them wore his customary face, however abnormal the working of his heart. The Redcross victims, and many another innocent man besides, behaved like gentlemen, Englishmen, and Christians. There was neither outward fuss nor fury.

The individual who came nearest to breaking down was naturally Mr. Carey. The very forbearance with which he was treated cut to the quick the honest man who had been the tool of fools and knaves, brazening out their share of the business and contriving to escape with the least damage of anybody. They had been impecunious, trading upon other people's funds to begin with, and Carey's Bank's failure only left them where they were originally, under circumstances in which no reasonable person would expect redress from them. But poor James Carey, who had been credulous and weak, was made of other stuff.

"I'm not easy about Carey," the little doctor confided to his wife. "He was talking quite in a stupid, dazed way to Russell and me this morning. Do you observe his eyes? Have you noticed the veins on his forehead and his throat? I'm far from comfortable about him." (As if he felt comfortable about anything at this period!) "I question much whether he'll ever get over it."

The public of Redcross, who could remark the glassy look of the eyes, though they might not be qualified to speak of the condition of the veins, were still more struck by the immediate and melancholy effect the bank's failure had on Mr. Carey, when their attention was drawn to Mrs. Carey's behaviour. She was a woman who had seldom left her house save for her daily drive, now she walked out with her husband every fine afternoon. Her arm was drawn through his; but it was evident at the merest glance that she was supporting his failing steps and not he hers. She was a little, thin, somewhat wizened woman, but she looked equal to the task she had set herself, if a strong will would do it. There was a peculiarity to be seen in her eyes too, by those who could read the sign. It was a fixed desperate determination to keep her husband and the father of her children by sustaining his weakness with her strength, to fight and vanquish the enemy whose icy touch was already on his heart and brain.

But although there was little outward demonstration in Redcross, much inner ferment and growing concern prevailed beneath the surface in what had been considered the principal houses in Redcross—houses safe and sure as they were honourable in their ascendancy in the past. After the affairs of the bank were in the hands of liquidators, and it became clear that the ruin was great and complete, hope had hardly a hole or corner left to linger in, even in the hearts of the most simple and sanguine. The impending changes which must follow became the talk of the town, extending to circles far beyond that on which the blow had fallen. Within the narrower limits, the anxious question what was to be done became the one engrossing, breathless subject of the hour.

Some of the reforms and retrenchments were marked by the spasmodic haste and severity which are apt to defeat themselves. These formed pendants to the spurts of grovelling distrust and quaking care for one's own welfare which caused Wilkins the butcher to send in his quarter's bill before it was due to Colonel Russell, and have the debt discharged within the hour. In like manner, Honeyman the grocer felt bound delicately to intimate to the Careys that he declined to give the family more than a week's credit. He was answered in a formally polite note from Mrs. Carey to the effect that she had not intended to ask for any longer credit thenceforth, but from that date she would pay ready money. These offensively defensive acts and vulgar tokens that times were changed got wind, and were discussed in awed, indignant whispers by the mass of Wilkins's and Honeyman's fellow-townsmen.

There was little need to remind the poor Careys of their altered circumstances, since it was in the Bank House that some of the spasmodic sweeping reforms referred to had at once been practised by Mrs. Carey. She had always been the ruling spirit in the house, and people now said openly that it would have been well for everybody if she had been the ruling spirit in the bank also. She was a woman with locally aristocratic connections, of a more tangible kind than what constituted the Millars' shadowy link with the county. Her brother was Sir Charles Luxmore of Headley Grange, and her nephew had allied himself to the peerage by marrying an Honourable Victoria Brackenridge. All the greater the glaring recklessness and insolence of Honeyman to take the word into his own mouth and refuse the Careys credit. At the same time Sir Charles's place was nearer the town of Nenthorn than that of Redcross, and he did not deal with Redcross tradesmen unless at election times. As for his daughter-in-law, the Honourable Victoria, she came so seldom to see her aunt-in-law that her face could not be said to be known in Redcross streets, where she never entered even the "fancy shop" which the other county ladies patronized occasionally in search of missing shades of silks or wools.

Mrs. Carey had stooped considerably when she became the wife of Mr. Carey of the bank, though the bank was nominally his own, and the Careys were a highly respectable family of old standing in Redcross. When it came to that, there had only been two generations of the Luxmores at Headley Grange, and the original baronet's rise to the honours of knighthood and a baronetage was due to his success and favour in high places as a fashionable physician. Mrs. Carey had not been very young at the date of her marriage, and her fortune was moderate enough, for the moneyed strength of her grandfather and father had gone to found a family and support a baronetage. Still, she had been accustomed to carry herself, after she became Mrs. Carey, not in an obtrusive and offensive manner, but in a quiet, well-bred way, as one who had been undeniably better born and bred than her neighbours. Indeed, under any circumstances she would have been a reserved woman, who would, in homely parlance, have kept herself to herself.

This was the woman who, with an absence of any sense of proportion, and an equal lack of humour, sometimes to be found in women of her class and character, together with an excess of mingled fiery zeal and feverish apprehension, hidden under a quiet exterior, took her measures on the very day after the bank's failure. These measures made a thorough exposure of the conclusion which she had arrived at, and subjected herself and the whole family to immediate privations, for which they were unprepared. They were injurious as well as useless and uncalled for, and had a ludicrous side. Acting for Mr. Carey, she dismissed the coachman and the gardener, paying them their month's wages which were unearned. She let the valuable horses take their chance of casual grooming and feeding, till they were sold off. She left the garden at the most critical time of the year, as the old gardener said with tears in his eyes, when the young vegetables were only coming into use, and the whole fruit would be lost unless it were properly seen to. The wood pigeons would have all the later seeds springing in the beds, and the place on which he had bestowed so much time and labour would lie waste, instead of providing a considerable part of the food of the household in summer and autumn. "But there was never no sense in them ladies like missus, no more in their sparing than in their spending." At one fell swoop she dismissed her own maid, the cook, and the parlour-maid, retaining only a young table-maid to "do" for the family.

Mrs. Carey had hitherto been an indulgent mother, but all at once she told the scandalized university dandy and failure, Cyril, that he must brush his own boots and help his schoolboy brothers to clean the knives, if he were not satisfied with what a maid-of-all-work could accomplish in these departments.

As for Ella and Phyllis, looking on aghast at the wholesale destruction of what they had been accustomed to consider the ordinary comforts—not to say the luxuries and refinements of their home—the girls were informed that they were not to go back to Miss Burridge's, where their quarters were paid in advance. The younger brothers might continue at the Grammar School, because the fees were low; they would be kept out of harm, and they could do nothing else to speak of. But Ella and Phyllis had better lose no time in learning to make beds, sweep floors, and lay tables. "For myself, I have your father to see to," said Mrs. Carey in her somewhat deep and strong voice, the measured steadiness of which had acquired a ringing vibration. "I do not mean to conceal from you that Dr. Millar is apprehensive on your father's account, and I intend to devote myself to him. We must pull him through and save him at any cost, though his health and nerves may be shattered from this date, and he may never be able to retrieve his losses and those of other people, which, of course, press most heavily upon him. We can try at least for the credit as well as the life which is so dear to us, and never have it said for his sake, still more than for ours, that he was blind and imposed upon, and then let himself slip out of the misery which he had helped to bring about, while others who were not accountable were condemned to pay the penalty."

Mrs. Carey would fain not have touched a farthing of the income allowed the family till the bank's affairs were wound up—that winding-up which Dr. Millar said might last throughout his life. She would willingly have resigned the bulk of her small fortune in favour of the bank's creditors, but marriage settlements and trustees are stubborn facts to deal with. All she could do was to stint and punish herself and her family in the manner described, and inasmuch as the stinting and punishment were done in good faith, doubtless they would serve their purpose and have their reward.

The Rector was a widower. Hitherto he had kept an efficient housekeeper and chaperon for his daughters, the elder of whom must now take the housekeeper's place. He, too, put down what had served him for a carriage. It was remarkable how uniformly the first idea of retrenchment took this form in Redcross, but it was natural under the circumstances. It was difficult to say at once what was to be cut down from a not very extensive list of supernumeraries, unless one was prepared to make a clean sweep like Mrs. Carey. The Rector had been simple enough in his tastes and habits. He was a member of the Church of England Temperance Society, and so had no valuable cellar of wine to dispose of. He did not possess more silver plate than was wanted for the Rectory table. His library contained no rare and costly books. The very carriage in question was no more than one of those pony-phaetons with regard to which Bishop Pattison appealed, in one of his letters from Melanesia to his brethren in peaceful, pleasant country rectories and vicarages at home, asking the astonished clergymen, with their clergywomen in the background, if they really considered the clerical equipage, with its modest expense, equivalent to a divine institution? The Rector proved his freedom from the superstition by doing away with the phaeton and its pair, and falling back, as he was a spare man, on an old pony which the children had ridden by turns. Though he was not a book fancier, he had entertained a fondness for art, and since he could not indulge in much picture buying, had dabbled in old prints, of which he had rather a fine collection. This all at once vanished along with the phaeton.

Bell Hewett, the second daughter, who was several years younger than her sister Lucy, but had left Miss Burridge's some time before, and was as far removed from a school-girl as Annie Millar herself, unexpectedly appeared again on the familiar benches. She was not there as a junior governess, she was not sufficiently clever or educated, since Miss Burridge sought to work up to the new standards. Poor Bell was in her old place, in her old classes, as a pupil once more, only she sat looking deeply affronted, and nervously trying to make up for lost time, among a set of young girls like May Millar.

There was not much difference made in Colonel Russell's establishment. But this was caused by one of two things. There was the probability of the establishment's soon being broken up, if its master succeeded in getting a post which should enable him to return to India. On the other hand, the second Mrs. Russell was too foolish and self-willed to comprehend without a prolonged struggle how she and her babies could get along unless they were fortified by every imaginable aid in the shape of an expensive table, fine clothes, a couple of under nurses, and a boy in buttons. Fanny Russell, the Colonel's grown-up daughter by his first wife, looked sad enough over the prospect of her father's departure at his age, with his shattered constitution, and over what was to become of herself, left behind with the frivolous, unreasonable young stepmother with whom Fanny had never been able to agree.

The Millars were still in the old quaintly spacious house with its great bowery garden, for the plausible reason that Dr. Millar could not, on the spur of the moment, find a purchaser or an available tenant. He took some credit to himself for having more breadth of view and controlling common sense than poor Mrs. Carey, otherwise he might have rushed off and crammed his family into a small inconvenient house, for which, at the same time, he would have had to pay rent, that was not called for, unless in the form of rates and taxes, where his old house was concerned. There might be something to say on the other side of the question, but as yet that had not occurred to Dr. and Mrs. Millar. However, the Doctor's brougham, like the Rector's phaeton, was a thing of the past. He trudged manfully on foot to his patients. There are few evils which do not offer some compensations. It really seemed as if the Doctor's deprivation, which weighed heavily on his wife's mind, served to divert it from other trials, by the degree to which it was occupied in looking after her husband's changes of coats and boots, in order to ward off evil consequences to his health.

The four girls were so engrossed with what had happened and was going to happen to them from the failure of Mr. Carey's bank, that they had largely lost sight of the first wooer in the family. This was strong evidence of the extent to which their minds were filled by the rapid descent of what they called poverty on themselves and their neighbours. Rose and May ceased to have qualms of conscience when they caught sight of Tom Robinson fishing in the Dewes, not knowing what desperate promptings of despair might not suddenly lay hold of a rejected and forlorn lover. They left off glancing covertly at him in his pew at church, for the purpose of detecting the earliest symptoms of a broken heart and a galloping consumption. Instead they speculated on whether Bell Hewett would have had a new hat if it had not been for the bank's failure; and whether her brother's absence from home was owing to his having gone to London for the first look at the columns of the advertising newspapers, and that he might be on the spot to apply in person at the addresses given, and to haunt the agency offices, as young men are represented doing in novels.

Inevitably Tom Robinson's recent intercourse with the family had been confined to a formal call or two, awkward and unpleasant to all concerned. Only Dr. Millar brought him into the conversation occasionally, dealing with his name in the spirit of a faithful partisan. "That good fellow Robinson did not draw out a farthing of his deposit at the bank after disquieting rumours must have reached him. Carey tells me that Robinson, in place of seeking to be reassured, did his best to reassure him, Carey; told him never to mind him, he could lie out of the money; he was willing to let others who had more need be paid first. Ah! well, it is good to have it in your power to be both just and generous, and it is still better to have a heart to use the power. Robinson has acted handsomely throughout, in short, like the gentleman he is. I wonder if his behaviour on this occasion will weigh with snobs against the iniquity of his having a shop. I thought Thackeray had done something to demolish similar rubbish when he described the young cads who gave the schoolboy Dobbin the nickname 'Figs.'"

The speaker was guilty of glaring rather fiercely at his daughters, assembled for afternoon tea. They became eminently innocent and meek-looking on the instant, but when the sisterhood were left to themselves Annie delivered her opinion with admirable fairness and candour.

"I am sure I am glad that Tom Robinson should behave himself like a gentleman, but that does not make his trade a profession fit for a gentleman, neither does it render the man, with his lack of ambition and his commonplaceness and dulness, an interesting specimen of humanity."

"Not a man that a woman would care to die for," said Rose, wrinkling her forehead and crumpling up her nose till her face was half its natural length. "Oh, I say, think of any woman being so infatuated as to be willing to die for an insignificant, foxy-headed, well-bred shopkeeper!"

"Don't be slangy, Rose," Annie rebuked her sister.

"Still I am very glad," said Dora's soft voice quite distinctly, and while she blushed furiously she reared her little neck with an unconscious gesture. It said plainly, "Yes, I am glad that the man who sought me for his wife has shown himself liberal and merciful, so that I can always think of him and his wishes with respect and gratitude."

"And so am I glad," agreed May warmly. "It is so nice that 'Robinson's' has not made its master grasping and greedy."

"I don't know that rapacity is confined to trade," admitted Annie. "You ought to know, May, for you have a good deal of intercourse with royalty in your reading; but I have a notion that it has been the distinguishing characteristic of a good many kings and emperors."

Annie and Rose had grown more and more eager to take up their burdens from the first day they were aware that there were burdens for them to take up. They were becoming positively enamoured of pushing their fortunes and encountering adventures—not in the least understanding, in spite of their bright wits, what the burdens, fortunes, adventures might mean. The two sisters' enthusiasm was just kept within bounds by two drags on its quicksilver quality. These laggard spirits, Dora and May, weighed upon their more enterprising companions. Neither could Annie and Rose quite shut their eyes to the increase of wrinkles on their father's face, and to their mother's red eyes when she came down of a morning. If it had not been for these small drawbacks, it is to be feared that Annie and Rose would have arrived at such a height of tete exaltee that they would have begun to rejoice in their own and their neighbours' misfortunes. There was something so fresh and exciting in looking about for openings and careers, in calculating how they were to earn their bread—which would taste so sweet to those who earned it—and at the same time save money. They were not quite so insane as to propose to amass fortunes and fling them into the gulf caused by the crumbling away of the late bank in order to redeem their father's pledge as a shareholder. But surely in the course of a year or two they might help him, and generally assist in keeping the old folks at home in state and bounty.

Annie and Rose looked on working for themselves in a very different light from that in which they regarded Tom Robinson's sticking to his father's and grandfather's shop. To be sure, they did not start with any intention of keeping shops. Even if they had done so, the descent might have been redeemed by a dash of sentiment and romance which did not apply in the least to a man with only himself to look to, a man of independent means to boot, who had forgotten what was expected from a gentleman.

There was no danger of Dora or May's being infected with their sisters' frame of mind. Dora and May were mortally ashamed of themselves. They feared they were not of the stuff of which heroines—not to say martyrs—were made. They looked back almost as fondly and sadly as their mother looked on the old state of matters. They dreaded with a shrinking terror going away from home, leaving their people, facing the cold, critical world, being left to their own slender resources. It was bad enough in Dora, but it was really dreadfully disappointing in May, with her youthful learning, to have so little spirit and courage; still so it was, and in the meantime there was no help for it. Dora might have been glad for purely personal reasons to get away from Redcross for a time; but she was not thrown into Tom Robinson's company, and the fact of his refusal had been kept so quiet by the Millars that, unless he himself betrayed it, which was not likely, the greatest gossip in the place could only suspect the truth.

It was a small comfort to the unheroic pair, and perhaps to Annie and Rose also, though they did not consciously take it into account, that all the older professional men in the town, the leaders and those who were on most intimate terms, were "in the same boat," as Dr. Millar had said. But there was a family named Dyer lately settled at Redcross, a semi-retired stockbroker, with his wife and daughters, who had come from London to occupy Redcross Manor-house—naturally they had nothing to do with Carey's Bank, and were still supposed to be rolling in wealth, as they had been reported from the first. However, there was a notion that the Dyers' riches had not been acquired in any very refined fashion. Cyril Carey had always insisted, as he settled his collar and twirled his cane, that stockbroker was simply pawnbroker writ large. Anyhow the Dyers were not so distinguished in mind and manners as they were wealthy. Old conservative folks sighed at the idea of Redcross Manor-house, which had belonged to the Cliftons from time immemorial, till the last Clifton fell into the hands of the Jews before he was twenty, and was driven to break the entail by the time he was forty, passing to a family of Dyers. The best that could be said of them was, that the old people were comparatively inoffensive and the young were presentable. They were inclined to be friendly with the town—it might be till they could secure a footing with the county people, if that were possible. They dressed well, thanks to their milliners and dressmakers, kept a good table, a good stable, and a good staff of domestics, and furnished Redcross—especially young Redcross—with country-house hospitalities and gay gatherings, which they would otherwise have lacked. Yet fanatics of young people like Annie and Rose Millar, who were persuaded that they were now well acquainted with a reverse of fortune, began to behave as if they considered it was no longer the creme de la creme of human experience to amass and retain a fortune. They began to pity the rampantly prosperous family for the lack on their part of any knowledge of life's vicissitudes, with their trumpet call to earnest effort and supreme self-devotion—all that makes man or woman worthy of the name. As for the younger Dyers, they were content to echo the sentiments of their mouthpiece, the head of their house. He spoke in the privacy of his family with a half-affable, half-contemptuous concern for those unfortunate beggars of uppish Redcross townspeople who had all come to smash by the failure of one paltry twopenny-halfpenny local bank.

The Millars were constantly hearing of fresh examples of hardship, and courage to meet the hardship, piquing and inciting them to enterprise and self-sacrifice on their own account. Now it would be May, who would come in from Miss Burridge's with a blanched face, crying, "Oh! you girls, do you know Ella Carey has gone and is not coming back again? Phyllis is crying her eyes out, because she and Ella were never separated before. No, Ella has not gone to be a lady-help, as she thought she might do, after she had got a little more practice in washing dishes and peeling potatoes. It is nothing bad, except that she is gone for good and all, and it has been so sudden. And Mrs. Carey says Ella is not to come back. One of her sisters, the one without children, Mrs. Tyrrel, wrote and offered to take either of the girls. And what do you think Mrs. Carey said? That Ella must go, because if she went there would be a mouth less to feed. She was sorry, because she said it was giving up Ella, and she told her she must not expect to have much more to do with Phyllis and the rest of them at home, for it would be out of the question, in the different circumstances of the Tyrrels and Careys, for them to carry on frequent or intimate intercourse. Ella would have refused if she had dared, for she is so fond of Phyllis and all of them, even of her mother, though she has grown very hard since the bank failed. She used to let the girls have their own way. Don't you remember, Rose, she allowed us to dress up for charades out of her wardrobe? Why, you once wore her wedding-gown pinned up round you. But Mrs. Carey would not give Ella any choice. She repeated that there would be one mouth the less to feed. She said Ella was the elder, and it was her duty to her father and his creditors to go. So all poor Ella's things were sought out and packed up last night—the letter only came yesterday. She has had no time to bid Rose and me, or any of her other friends, good-bye. She started with Cyril early this morning, and I don't know what Phyllis will do without her."

"She must do the best she can," said Annie promptly, "and occupy herself with something better than gossiping with you when she chances to meet you coming from school. I suppose that was the manner in which you heard all this; I don't think Mrs. Carey will approve of such a waste of time."

"But, Annie," pled May, with her dark eyes ready to brim over, "poor Phyllis has only me now, and she has a great many messages to go, because their single servant has so much work to do in the house that she cannot get out marketing. Mrs. Carey is always walking or sitting with Mr. Carey. If it were not so, Phyllis is sure that her mother would go out and not mind taking the market-basket herself—a rough, heavy market-basket. The Careys' servants used to complain because one of them was expected to carry it in the mornings. Phyllis is glad to let me have it sometimes, her arms get tired and ache so. You see Jack and Dick are not often home from school in time, and then they have the boots and knives to clean. Cyril would carry it for her after it was dark, but Mrs. Carey won't let her go out then, and sends her off to bed that she may get up earlier for what she has to do in the morning."

That rough market-basket over which the Careys' former servants had grumbled, was like a badge of honour in certain shining eyes—far more so than Thirza Dyer's thoroughbred, or Camilla and Gussy Dyer's exquisite hats and dainty parasols. Even Annie Millar was not too old or too wise to refrain from wishing that Mrs. Millar, who still would not let her daughters soil their fingers if she could help it, had sent them out marketing in their native town, each in her turn flourishing a market-basket.

At another time it would be Rose who would arrive flushed and breathless with the great piece of news that Ned Hewett had taken the post of station-master at a small station somewhere on the Yorkshire moors. He had done it when nothing else turned up, without waiting to consult his father. But the Rector had not forbidden him when he heard. Steadiness and punctuality had always been Ned's strong points, so that, though he had not taken his degree at the university, and his old masters had said they were not surprised to hear it, he might be trusted not to wreck trains, slay their passengers, and find himself tried for manslaughter. The difficulty was to fancy a big, slow fellow like Ned rushing here and there in a noisy, fussy little station. After all, it would only be noisy and fussy at long intervals, and on rare occasions, "somewhere on the Yorkshire moors." Ned might have time and space to walk about in. But what of the uniform? Would the poor boy—they had all known him as a boy—who had once cherished the notion of going into the army, have to wear a railway company's coat and a station-master's cap? How funny it sounded! Well, not altogether funny. There were Dora and May crying at the bare anticipation. If they were ever on the Yorkshire moors, and had to greet Ned in this extraordinary guise, it would be awkward for all parties, to say the least. What were they thinking of? Of course they would be proud to greet him when he was twice the man that he had ever been. No doubt Cyril Carey would be glad to have Ned's chance; Cyril, who had renounced his delicate plush vests and Indian gold chains and charms, his loitering and dawdling, and taken to a shabby shooting-suit and spade-husbandry. He was getting rid of his time and keeping out of his mother's way by digging aimlessly in the garden. He was inquiring, in a desultory fashion, all over Redcross for any opening in an office which he could fill. He was not likely to find such an opening unless it were made for him out of charity. He had not been trained to office work, and he was far from having Ned Hewett's reputation for steadiness and punctuality. If Tom Robinson should be the charitable man and ask Cyril, a schoolfellow and college chum, to help him with his accounts, the head of "Robinson's" would have to be at the trouble of running up every column of figures over again. Cyril might ride to hounds and row in a boat-race with the best; he might even have some elegant acquaintance with the renaissance and old French, and be capable of distinguishing himself in stately Latin verse, though that sounded more than doubtful when he had been plucked at his university—the inhabitants of Redcross did not, as a rule, pretend to be judges in such matters. What they did know, because it had oozed out some time before, was that Cyril Carey, though a banker's son, was lamentably weak in arithmetic, and his handwriting would have been held a disgrace to any shop-boy.

Money was required to start lads in the world in the humblest fashion. Ned Hewett wanted an outfit, and if possible furniture for his station-house, that he might not begin on credit. Even girls, though they had been a good deal set aside in such consideration, could not enter on an independent career without money any more than boys could. The Millars were therefore thankful that Mrs. Millar had a little money of her own, not above a hundred and fifty pounds a year, settled upon her from the first, by one of those marriage contracts which are so hard to break, and she could use it to supply what was needed for the girls, who were going into the world with such dauntless spirits and light hearts.



CHAPTER VII.

ROSE GOES WEST AND ANNIE GOES EAST.

In the end it was settled, to Annie and Rose's great satisfaction, and no less to the temporary relief of Dora and May's quaking hearts, that the two former were to take the first plunge into unknown waters. If things had been as they were formerly, and there had been leisure to spare from rougher rubs for highly delicate considerations, it might, as has been hinted, have been held that Dora should have been the sister selected to go away from Redcross—at least for a time.

But a great deal had happened since Tom Robinson's unsuccessful suit and all connected with it had been in honour hushed up. People had too many weighty matters to think of to keep in mind that small sentimental episode between a couple of young people.

Rose's fate was chalked out from the first. She was to be an artist—that went without saying. She had certainly artistic talent, she might have genius. But though she had been tolerably well trained so far, by a good drawing-master at Miss Burridge's, and by the lessons she had received from the wandering exhibitor at the Academy and the Grosvenor, neither she nor her family could be sufficiently infatuated to imagine she wanted no more teaching. Their conceptions of art might be crude, and their faith in Rose unbounded, but they did not suppose that she had only to open her portfolio and sell its contents as often as it was full. Dr. and Mrs. Millar made up their minds, Rose agreeing with them, that she should have at least a year in a London studio.

All the three considered it very fortunate when the artist who had given her lessons at Redcross, hearing of her intention, and of what had rendered it incumbent on her to work for her living, not only recommended a studio in which art classes were held, but good-naturedly gave her a testimonial and helped her to a post as assistant drawing-mistress in a ladies' school, a situation which she could fill on two days of the week, while she attended the art classes on the remaining four. The salary thus obtained was of the smallest, but it would supplement Mrs. Millar's allowance to Rose, and help to pay her board in some quiet, respectable family living midway between the school and the studio. Rose was a lucky girl, and she thought herself so. Indeed that minimum salary raised her to such a giddy pinnacle in her own estimation that it nearly turned her head. It was only her sisters, the wise Annie among them, who regarded the assistant drawing-mistress-ship with impatience as a waste of Rose's valuable time and remarkable talents.

A qualification came soon to Rose's exultation and to her pride in being the first of her father's daughters—and she the third in point of age—who had just left school, and had hardly been reckoned grown-up by Annie till quite lately—to earn real tangible money, gold guineas, however few. For something better still befell Annie. If Rose was lucky, Annie was luckier. True, she would never be a great artist, she would never get hundreds and thousands for a picture. At the utmost she would only be at the head of a charitable institution. She might save the greater part of her income then, and hand it over to her father, but that was a very different prospect from the other. Still, from the beginning Annie would be, so to speak, self-supporting; she need not cost her mother or anybody else a penny, her very dress would be provided for her. Above all Annie was going to do a great deal of good, to be a comfort and blessing, not only to her people, but to multitudes besides. She was, please God, to help to lessen the great crushing mass of pain and misery in the world, not by passive, sentimental sympathy, not by little fitful, desultory doles of practical aid, but by the constant daily work of her life. Young as Rose was, and enamoured of art in her way, she was able to comprehend that if Annie could do that worthy deed, her life would be greater in a sense, fuller in its humanity, perhaps also sweeter than that of the most famous and successful painter.

Annie had always taken a lively interest in her father's profession, and he had liked her to do so. He had been fond of talking to her about it, and enlightening her on some of its leading principles. He had even pressed her into his service in little things, and been gratified by the hereditary firmness and lightness of grasp and touch, the control over her own nerves and power of holding those of others in check, the quick and correct faculty of observation she had displayed. But with all his loyal allegiance to the calling which had been his father's before it was his, which he would have liked to see his son fill, if a son had been born to him, he was taken aback and well-nigh dismayed, as her mother was, when Annie came and told them quietly that she had made up her mind, if they would consent, to go into an hospital and be trained for a nurse. He laid before her as calmly and clearly as he could the conditions of the undertaking, and reminded her that it could not be gone into by halves, while he thought, as he spoke, that Annie was not the style of young woman to go into anything by halves.

Mrs. Millar followed with a trembling recital of the painfulness, the absolute horror to a young girl of many of the details of the office. But Annie was not shaken in the least. "I should not mind that," she asserted with conviction. "I know there must be strict discipline and hard trying work, with no respite or relaxation to speak of; but I am young and strong, fitter to stand such an ordeal than most girls of my age are qualified. I am too young, you say? Yes, I admit that; it is a pity—at least I know I have always reckoned myself too young when the thought crossed my mind six months—a year ago, of leaving home and becoming trained for a nurse."

"You don't mean to say, Annie, that you ever thought of going out into the world before our misfortunes in connection with the bank?" cried both father and mother in one breath.

Annie hung her shapely head a little, then held it up, and confessed frankly, "Yes, I have. Oh, you must forgive me. It was not from any failure of kindness on your part, or, I trust, any failure on mine to appreciate your kindness, for I believe you are the best, dearest father and mother in the world," she cried, carried out of herself, and betrayed into enthusiasm. "But what were you to do with a houseful of girls, when one would have served to give you all the help you need, mother, in your housekeeping and the company you see? I have hated the idea of being of no use in the world, unless I chanced to marry," ended Annie, with a quick, impatient sigh.

"My dear, you are talking exaggerated nonsense." Mrs. Millar reproved her daughter with unusual severity, dislodging her cap by the energy of her remonstrance, so that Annie had to step forward promptly, arrest it on its downward path, and set it straight before the conversation went any further. "Nobody said such things when I was young. I was one of a household of girls, far enough scattered now, poor dears!"—parenthetically apostrophizing herself and her youthful companions with unconscious pathos—"I would have liked to hear any one say to us, or to our father and mother, that we were no good in the world. I call it a positive sin in the young people of this generation to be so restless and dissatisfied, and so ready to take responsibilities upon themselves. It is a temptation of Providence to send such calamities as the one we are suffering from. You will know more about life when you are forced to work for yourself, and do not set about it out of pure presumption and self-will, with a good home to fall back upon when you are tired of your fad."

Mrs. Millar had been hurt and mortified by Annie's avowal. She had been further nettled by the slighting reflection on a houseful of girls, made by one of themselves, while she, their mother, the author of their being, poor unsophisticated woman! had always been proud of her band of bright, fair young daughters, and felt consoled by their very number for the lack of a son.

"Come, come, mother," said Dr. Millar, "you must make allowance for the march of ideas."

"I cannot help it," said Annie, with another quick sigh. "I suppose girls are not so easily satisfied as they once were, or they have been taken so far, and not far enough, out of their place. I could not have remained content with tennis-playing and skating, or rechauffe school music, French and German, or fancy work, however artistic—not even with teaching once a week in the Rector's Sunday-school—for my object in life. But after the way in which things have turned out, there is no need to discuss former views. Mother dear, it is surely well that I had not a hankering after idleness, after lying in bed half the forenoon, as people say the Dyers do, getting up only to read the silliest and fastest of novels, with secret aspirations after diamonds and a carriage and pair, if not a coach and six. Of course I should not have been contented with a one-horse shay, a mere doctor's pill-box, such as you have put down, father, which Rose and May are determined to set up for you again before they are many year's older."

"Good little chits!" exclaimed the little Doctor, blowing his nose suspiciously. "Tell them, Annie, that I like walking above all things. I find it a great improvement on driving. I have been troubled with—let me see, oh! yes, cold feet—a deficiency in the circulation, not at all uncommon when one gets up in years, and after walking a bit I feel my toes all tingling and as warm as a toast."

"I should prefer nursing to any other mode of earning my living," said Annie, keeping to her point. "I may be presumptuous, like the girls of my day, as mother says, but I really think that I have a natural turn for nursing, derived from you father, and grandfather, no doubt, which might have made me also a good doctor supposing I had been a man, or supposing I had sought from the first to be a medical woman and had been educated accordingly. If I am wrong, you will set me right, won't you?"

In place of contradicting her, he simply nodded in acquiescence, while he linked his hands across the small of his back.

"Mother, I do not think I should shrink from dressing wounds, if I only knew the best thing to do to avoid danger and give relief. You remember when Bella burnt her arm badly from the elbow to the wrist, I tied it up to keep out the air, before father came in, and he said it was rightly done, and would not change the dressing. And when poor Tim, who has lost his place with the putting down of the brougham, gave his hand the terrible hack with the axe in breaking wood for cook, I was able to stop the loss of blood, and did not get in the least faint myself. Yes, I know it would be very pitiful to see a human creature die whom we could not save," she added, in a lower tone, "and very sad to prepare such a one for the grave. But, dear mother, somebody has to do it at some time, and I may be the somebody one day, anyhow I shall have to be indebted to my neighbour to do the last charitable offices for me. It might be all the easier to look forward to in my own case if I had done it for other people, not merely because they were my own, just because they were God's creatures, and He had set me, among other women, to do the sorrowful work, and would lend me strength for the task."

"I believe it, Annie," said Dr. Millar firmly, as he looked at the reverently bent head, and listened to the faltering yet faithful words.

Mrs. Millar said no more, though the poor lady still shivered, as she looked at the girl in her brilliant youthful bloom. It was too terrible to think of her associated with disease and death, she whom her father and mother would have sheltered from every rough wind. Yet what was pretty Annie in the ranks of humanity, in the march of history? The frivolous product of a heathen world, the feminine counterpart of some

"Idle singer of an empty day"?

or—

"A creature breathing thoughtful breath, A traveller 'twixt life and death"—

a Christian girl who with all true Christians had the Lord Christ, who went about doing good, for an everlasting example? And had there not all along been something fine in Annie, under her superficial hardness and inclination to conceal her feelings, something which her family had not suspected, brought to light by their troubles? something of which everybody connected with her would be prouder in all humility, with reason, in the days to come, than they had ever been proud of her supreme prettiness and lively tongue in times past.

"It is a pity about my age," went on Annie ingenuously, lamenting over her deficiency in years as other people lament over their superfluity in that respect, "but it is a fault which will mend every day. I have found out that there are two hospitals which make twenty-three—just a year older than I am—the age of admission for probationers, and there is one hospital that admits them at twenty. Would not the fact of my being a doctor's daughter go for something? Have you not interest, father, if you care to exert it, to get the hospital authorities to stretch a point where I am concerned? You might tell them that I am the eldest of the family," drawing up her not very tall figure, "that I have been treated as grown-up for years and years, and that I have several younger sisters whom I have tried to keep in order." There was a returning twinkle in Annie's brown eyes and a comical curve of her rosy lips.

But she relapsed into extreme gravity the next moment; indeed, she was more agitated than she had yet been, and for Annie to betray an approach to tearfulness was a rare spectacle.

"There is something worse than my age. I am afraid I am not half good enough. I have a hasty temper; you have frequently said so, mother. I often speak sharply, and am not always aware when I am doing it. I hurt people, as I hurt myself, without being able to help it—something seems to come over me and impel me to do it. Often I cannot resist making game of people. I am so silly and fond of fun, like a child, a great deal worse than 'little May' ever is, when the fit is upon me. Now, if I could think that I should lose patience with poor sick people, and wound instead of comforting them, or that I should find them food for my love of the ridiculous, and forget and neglect their wants in following my own amusement, I should hate myself—I would die sooner than so disgrace a nurse's calling."

"You would not do it, my dear," said Dr. Millar, with calm conviction.

"Why, what treason is this you are speaking against yourself?" cried Mrs. Millar, bristling up in her daughter's defence, the assailant being that daughter. "You unkind or unfeeling when there was any call for kindness—whoever heard of such a thing? I should as soon suspect Dora of harshness or levity in the same circumstances. Don't you remember my bad eyes last winter, when I had to get that tincture dropped into them so often that your father could not always be at home to do it? You dropped the tincture as well as your father could, and though I know I must have made faces wry enough to frighten a cat, you never vouchsafed a remark, and I did not hear the ghost of a laugh. Poor Dora was ready to read to me by the hour, and to fetch and carry for me all day long, but when she tried to drop the tincture her hand shook so that she sent the liquid down my cheeks; and she was so frightened for giving me pain that I could see when I opened my eyes she was as white as a sheet, and fit to faint herself."

"Dora's hand will get steadier and her heart harder by and by," said Dr. Millar, laughing. "Not that she has the knack of the operator, any more than you have, Maria. I don't think one of you has it, except Annie here."

"That was nothing," said Annie quickly. She added in a lower tone, "And oh, mother, how could you imagine that I should laugh at your pain?"

"It was only for a moment, and I daresay it was not agonizing, as I was tempted to call it; very likely your father and you would not have so much as winced at it. Then there was Miss Sill, poor old Miss Sill. Annie, I am afraid you girls laughed at her. Girls will be girls, and she does dress outrageously. You all said her mantles were worse than my cap," tenderly touching that untrustworthy piece of head-gear. "When she sent for your father all of a sudden, just when he had been summoned to Dr. Hewett's brother, who was very ill, as we knew, while we thought Miss Sill had only one of her maiden-lady fancies, your father told you to go over and say he would be with her in the course of the day. But you found her nearly choking with bronchitis. How you were not frightened out of your senses, I, who am a great deal more than twice your age, and the mother of a family, cannot tell. You propped her up in exactly the right position, saw to the temperature of the room, and caused her cook to bring in the kitchen boiler and set it to steam on the hob, before another doctor could be found. Miss Sill told me all about it afterwards; she believes she owes her life to you."

"Oh, nonsense," protested Annie, "I was a little better than her two servants, who stood looking at her, and beginning to sob and cry; but I made several gross mistakes. You told me about them afterwards, father; it was a great mercy that I did not cause her death."

"So far from that," continued Mrs. Millar, in triumphant defiance, "she calls you her young doctor to this day, and says she will send for you in preference to your father or any other doctor the next time she has an attack."

"Infatuated woman!" declared Annie.

"I have not needed to talk to you in order to get you to go with your sisters and see her since then. You have gone of your own accord twice as often, and I am sure you have not laughed at her half so much. In fact, I believe you are becoming quite attached to her."

"I suppose I am grateful to her for not dying in my unskilled hands. I am afraid I still think her rather fantastic and foolish; but it does make a difference in one's judgment of a person to have really rendered him or her a service. I ought to be fond of Miss Sill, after all, if she is to rank as my first patient."

Mrs. Millar sank into silence on the instant. She stood convicted in her own eyes. What had she been doing? Proving to her daughter's satisfaction that she had the special talents of a nurse!

"I am very glad that mother and you think me—not by any means good enough, of course, not that, but not too impatient, sarcastic, and trifling to be a nurse," said Annie brightly, addressing her father, who simply acquiesced in an absent-minded fashion.

After that there was no serious objection made to Annie's wish, great as the wonder was at first—a shock to her relations no less than to her acquaintances. The former reconciled themselves sooner to it than did the latter, with an entire faith in Annie and an affectionate admiration which was genuine homage. It swelled Dora's heart well-nigh to bursting with sister-worship. How good Annie was showing herself, how capable of great acts of self-denial and self-consecration, while she was prettier than ever with her graceful head, her merry brown eyes, and that soft, warm colour of hers!

Only Mrs. Millar lay awake at night and cried quietly over what lay before her young daughter, her first-born, the flower of the flock, as people had called her in reference to her beauty. Annie's pretty Grand-aunt Penny had at least enjoyed her day; she had had her triumph, however short-lived, in marrying the man of her heart, who was also a Beauchamp of Waylands, and in being raised for even a brief space to the charmed circle of the county. What she had to go through—whether she would or not—in the end, was not worse than Annie was proposing to encounter in the beginning, to live in an hospital, to spend her blooming life amidst frightful accidents, raging fevers, the spasm of agony replaced by the chill silence and stillness of death. Annie's father's time and strength had been given in much the same cause, ever since he was a young man passing his examinations and taking his diploma. But he was a man, which changed the whole aspect of affairs; besides he had always had a cheerful home to come back to, with the command of all the social advantages which Redcross, his native town, could afford. He had not lived among his patients with no life to speak of separate from theirs.

At the same time Mrs. Millar felt herself powerless. She dared no more interfere to keep back Annie from her calling than a good Roman Catholic mother would forbid her daughter's "vocation."



CHAPTER VIII.

STANDING AND WAITING.

It was all over in its earlier stages, that dividing and dispersing of the goodly young group of sisters, that bereaving and impoverishing of the abandoned home to which Dora and May had looked forward with such fear and pain, for which all Dr. Millar's fortitude and all his wife's meekness had been wanted to enable them to bear it with tolerable calmness. It was only Annie and Rose doing what every young man, with few exceptions, has to do. It was only their going away to work out their bents in London. They had often gone from home and followed various impulses and promptings before. But this was different. All who were left behind had a sure intuition that this was the beginning of the end, the sifting and scattering which every large family must undergo if their time is to be long on earth. Annie and Rose might often come back on visits. Rose might even set up a studio in Redcross and work there, but it would not be the same. She would be an independent member of society, with her own interests to think of—however faithfully and affectionately she might still be concerned for the interests of others—and her individual career to follow. Her separate existence would no longer be merged in that of a band of sisters; it would stand out clearly and distinctly far apart from the old state of tutelage and subserviency of each unit to the mass. The lament of the tender old Scotch song over the departing bride applied equally to Annie and Rose, though there were no gallant "Jamies" to accuse of taking them "awa', awa'." In the same manner it was not so much over the cause of their going that Dora and May lamented, or the father and mother's hearts were sorrowful, as

"Just that they'd aye be awa', awa'."

One day as May was coming back from school she met Tom Robinson, and he stopped her to ask how the family were, and to tell her something. There had always been less restraint in his and May's greetings than there had been in those of the others since his dismissal as a suitor. There was something in May's mingled studiousness and simplicity, and in the strong dash of the child in her, which dissipated his shyness and tickled his fancy. If matters had turned out otherwise than they had done, he told himself vaguely, he and "little May" would have been a pair of friends. He had no sister, and she had no brother, and he would have liked to play the brother to this most artless of learned ladies. "Look here, Miss May," he said, after the usual formulas, while he turned and walked a few paces by her side, "do you remember the fox-terrier puppy I was to have got for you and your sister Rose, in the spring? Well, he died of distemper, poor little brute; but I have heard of another of the same kind that has had the complaint. I could get him for you if you cared to have him."

"Oh! I am so much obliged to you, Mr. Robinson, so very much obliged," cried May, beaming with gratitude and pleasure. "Rose and I did so wish to have that dear little puppy which you brought down to show to us once—don't you remember? and so it is dead, poor little pet; and Rose has gone away to London to be regularly trained as an artist, just as Annie is in St. Ebbe's learning to be a nurse. I suppose you have heard," she ended a little solemnly.

"Yes, I have heard—let me carry these books for you a bit—what is there of Redcross news that one does not hear?" Then he paused abruptly, while there darted simultaneously across his mind and May's whether his speech did not sound as if he thought that Dora Millar's refusal of him must be public property? "For that very reason," he went on with a momentary shade of awkwardness, "I mean, because two of your sisters are gone, I fancied you might like this other little dog to keep you company."

"I have Dora," said May simply, and then she dashed on in an unhappy consciousness that she ought not to have mentioned Dora's name to him on any account. "I should like it immensely though—thank you a hundred thousand times, it was so good of you to think of me. But Rose could not have it now, could she? and she wished it quite as much as I did. It does not seem nice to have it when she is not here to share it," finished May, with wistful jealousy for Rose's rights in the matter.

"I do not see the force of that objection," said Tom Robinson, cheerfully. "Rose has something else instead. She has all London to occupy her. I am certain she would like you to make the best of Redcross without her."

"Yes, and of course the little dog would be half hers, the same as if Rose were here. She would see it every time she came home. She might have her turn of it at her studio, when she gets a studio. In the meantime I could write full particulars of it, how it grew and what it learnt. Oh, Mr. Robinson, has it white boots like the other you brought?"

"I am afraid I did not attend to his boots, or to his stockings either for that matter," said Tom with a laugh; "but he has a coal-black muzzle, his teeth are in perfect order, and I believe he has the correct tan spots."

"If mother would let us," said May longingly. "You know Rose and I had not spoken to her about it; we were waiting for a good opportunity to ask her, when you were so kind as to give us the chance of having the other little dog. Mother seldom refuses us anything which she can let us have, still Rose was not sure that mother would give her consent. You see she is troubled about the stair-carpets and the drawing-room rugs, and the garden-beds, and we were afraid she would think we should have the dog with us everywhere."

"Then it rested with yourself, I should say, to show her that you could keep a dog in his proper place."

"But I doubt if I could," said May candidly, shaking her head, with the brown hair which had till recently hung loose on her shoulders, now combed smoothly back, and twisted into as "grown-up" a twist as she could accomplish the feat; while to keep the tucked-up hair in company, her skirt was let down to the regulation length for young ladies. "Indeed, I am almost certain I could not refuse anything to a dear little dog coming to me and sitting up and begging for what he wanted. What is more, if I could Dora couldn't." She could have bitten out her tongue the next instant. What was she doing always speaking of Dora? What would he think? That she was wilfully dragging her sister's name into the conversation? And what had tempted her to say that Dora could not refuse anything to a dog, when she had refused her heart in exchange for his to the man walking beside May?

He made no remark. If his mouth twitched a little in reproach or sarcasm, she could not see it under his red moustache; besides, she dared not look at him.

"I wonder," continued Miss Malapropos, "how I could let you know what mother thought." She never once suggested his bringing the dog for inspection, as he had brought the other, or calling for her answer.

"You might drop me a note," he said, stopping to give her back her books, "and I hope for your sake that it may be favourable, for this is a nice little dog, and I think you would like him."

May went home more nearly on the wings of the wind than she had done since Rose's departure, and presented her petition. Mrs. Millar could not find it in her heart to refuse it, though the stair-carpet, the drawing-room rugs, and the garden-beds were all to be sacrificed.

"Poor little May! she misses Rose, though Dora and May have become great friends of late. Dora is very good, and puts herself on an equality with May, as Annie could not have done. Still, she does not rouse the child as Rose roused her. What do you think, Jonathan? Would a little dog be in your way? Would its barking disturb you?" Mrs. Millar appealed to her husband.

"Not in reason, Maria; not if it does not take to baying at the moon, or yelping beyond bounds. Dora gives in too much to May, in place of taking the child from her books, on which naturally she is inclined to fall back. Dora has become her audience, and listens to her performances—even aids and abets them. I caught them at it yesterday. First May actually declaimed several paragraphs from a speech of Cicero's, and next she got Dora to repeat after her the most crabbed of the Greek verbs. I shall have a couple of blue-stockings, and what is worse, one of them spurious, in the room of the single real production I reckoned upon among my daughters. By all means let May have a howling monster. She is not too old for a game of romps; and I must say, though I have never opposed the higher education of women, I don't want her cultivated into a gossamer, a woman all nerves and sensations, before she is out of her teens."

"Do you suppose Tom Robinson can still be thinking of Dora?" suggested Mrs. Millar dubiously.

"I wish he were," said the little Doctor, ruefully. "I wish he were. Yes, Mrs. Millar, I am sufficiently mercenary or sordid, or whatever you like to call it, where one of my daughters is concerned, to give expression to that sentiment. But I should say he is not, unfortunately. Robinson is a shy man, and, no doubt, proud after his fashion. It must have taken a great effort—premature, therefore mistaken, according to my judgment—for him to screw himself up to the pitch of proposing for a girl of whose answering regard he was uncertain. Having made the blunder and paid the penalty, he is not at all likely to put his fate to the touch again, so far as Dora is concerned. He is not the style of pertinacious, overbearing fellow who would persecute a woman with his attentions and ask her twice. Poor Dora has lost her chance, I take it."

"I cannot say that I think it any great loss, to this day," answered Mrs. Millar, stubbornly. She gave a toss of her head, of such unusual spirit, that it so nearly dislodged her cap. Dr. Millar involuntarily put out a finger and thumb to lay hold of the truant. "We have our worldly losses, to be sure, and the other poor dear girls have gone out into the world very cheerfully. I must say I could not have done what they have done with so good a grace—so heroic a grace, not to save my life, Jonathan. But that is not to say that they are to be in haste to marry—tradesmen. Indeed, when I come to think of it, the fact of their being so independent and able to provide for themselves, ought to be like having so many fortunes. It should entitle them to be more particular, and free to pick and choose the husbands who exactly suit them. Another thing, if our daughters are not worthy of being wooed and wooed, and asked—not twice, but half a dozen times, before they are persuaded to say yes, I don't know who is. The idea of their jumping at any man!—you have drawn me into vulgar language, Jonathan,—the moment he makes his bow is too bad or too good, I do not know which to say. You do not mean that I ever accustomed you to such forward behaviour?"

"No, no, Maria," the gentleman assured her with a smile, "far from it. There was a bad epidemic raging at the time our little business came off, don't you remember? I forget now whether it was small-pox or scarlet fever, but I know I was not only tremendously busy, I dared not go to your father's house. Then I heard that another swain—an officer fellow from the barracks at Craigton was hanging about either you or your poor sister Dolly, nobody could tell which, and I dared not delay longer. I was driven to the supreme rashness of committing my suit to paper, and what do you think you wrote back? Have you forgotten? You thanked me very prettily for the compliment I had paid you, and you promised to give the substance of my letter your best consideration. Literally that was all—to a man worn off his feet with work and hungering for a word of assurance."

"Go away with you, sir," exclaimed his wife, restored to high good humour, and tapping him on the shoulder. "You understood me perfectly—you had wit enough for that. You went off directly and ordered new drawing-room furniture, what we have to this day, on the strength of that letter—you know you did."

"Showed how far gone, and what a confiding simpleton I was," he said, and then he tried again to set her right with regard to Tom Robinson. "You don't understand Robinson, Maria. It is not that he was not in earnest, or that he is fickle or anything of the kind. It is rather a case of the better man being beaten, and fools rushing in where angels fear to tread. Such men as he is accept a sentence without disputing it, because they do not think too much of themselves while they think a great deal of other people. It is not a flaw in their sensitive manliness, it is part and parcel of it, to know when they are dismissed, and take the dismissal as final. They are not the most light-hearted and sanguine of mortals, but they are constant enough, and brave enough to boot, and a brave man is not without his compensations—

"'For sudden the worst turns the best to the brave,'

"some poet has written."

"So much the better," said Mrs. Millar, again with a suspicion of hauteur in her voice. "It is lucky for all parties, since I have not the slightest reason to suppose that Dora would change her mind."

"Then why find fault with poor Tom Robinson?" Dr. Millar remonstrated in vain.

The appearance of the dog on the scene with his fine pointed nose, alert eyes, incessantly vibrating little tail, and miniver black and white coat picked out with tan, caused May as much excitement and delight as if she did not know one Greek letter from another, and were innocent of Latin quantities. She was so wrapped up in her acquisition, so devoted to his tastes in food, the state of his appetite, his sleeping place, the collar he was to have, that for the first time in her life she had to be reminded of her books. It needed her great superiority to her companions in any approach to scholarly intellect and attainment to enable her to retain the first place in Miss Burridge's classical department.

"What shall we call him, Dora?" she earnestly consulted her sister, hanging breathless on the important answer.

"Call him whatever you like, May. You know he is your dog," said Dora with decision.

"Mine and Rose's," the faithful May made the amendment. "Of course Rose must agree to any name we think of, or it cannot stand. Perhaps she would like to choose the name as she is away. Don't you think it ought to be put in her power—that she ought to have the compliment?" suggested May quite seriously and anxiously. "I shall write to her this very minute."

But Rose, like Dora, left the name to May.

"It was so kind of Tom Robinson to remember and offer him to me," said May meditatively. "O Dora! do you think I might call him 'Tom'?"

"Certainly not," said Dora, with still greater decision. "What are you thinking of, May? I don't suppose Mr. Robinson would relish having a dog named for him. Besides, other people might wonder. 'Tom' is not an ordinary name for a dog, though it is common enough for a man."

"Nobody, not even the person most concerned, would know if I were to call him 'Son,' the termination of 'Robinson,' you know," explained May, after a moment spent in concocting this subtle amendment, and in fondling the unconscious recipient of a title which was to distinguish him from the mass of dogs.

"Are you out of your senses, May?" was the sole comment Dora deigned to deliver with some energy.

"'Friend,'" speculated May; "there is nothing very distinctive about 'Friend,' and I am sure it was the act of a friend to get him for me."

"'Foe' would be shorter and more easily said," was Dora's provoking comment; "or why not 'Fox,' since he is a fox-terrier? You might also desire to commemorate the donor's complexion, which you all used to call foxy," said Dora, half reproachfully, half dryly.

"I don't like doubles entendres," said May with dignity, "and if I ever said anything unkind of Tom Robinson I don't wish to be reminded of it now; anyhow, I could never give a sneer in return for a kindness."

"No, I don't believe you could, May," said Dora, penitently.

May continued a little nettled in spite of her natural good temper.

"What are Shakespeare's names for little dogs?" she asked. "'Blanche,' 'Tray,' and 'Sweetheart.' You could not be 'Blanche,' could you, pet, unless you were 'Blanche et Noir'? and that is too long and reminds one of a gaming-table. You could not be 'Sweetheart,'" went on May, revenging herself with great coolness and deliberation in view of the red that flew into Dora's cheeks; "no, of course not, because Mr. Tom Robinson is not, never has been, and never will be my sweetheart. There is only 'Tray' left. Well, I think it is rather a good name," considered May, critically. "'Old dog Tray' is an English classic. It is not altogether appropriate, because my Tray is just a baby terrier yet, but we trust, he and I, that he will live to see a venerable age."



CHAPTER IX.

A WILFUL DOG WILL HAVE HIS WAY.

Dora and May walked out together regularly, a practice enforced by their father as a provision for their health. To have Tray to form a third person in their somewhat formal promenades certainly robbed them of their formality, and introduced such an element of lively excitement into them as to bear out Dora's comparison of their progresses thenceforth to a succession of fox-hunts. For Tray was still in the later stages of his puppyhood. He was frequently inspired by a demon of mischief or haunted by a variety of vagabond instincts which such training as he had received, without the support of prolonged discipline and practical experience, failed to extinguish.

May was very particular about his education in theory, but in practice she fell considerably short of her excellent intentions. She always carried a whip with a whistle in the handle; and the sight of the instrument of punishment ought to have been enough for Tray, since there was no farther application of it. In reality, the sharp-sighted little animal no more obeyed the veritable whistle than he winced under the supposititious lash of the whip. He took his own way and did very much what he liked in spite of the animated protests of his mistress. Dora and May went out walking with Tray instead of Tray going on a walk with them, and not infrequently the walk degenerated into an agitated scamper at his heels. The scamper was diversified by a number of ineffectual attempts to reclaim him from forcing his way into back-yards and returning triumphantly with a bone or a crust between his teeth, "as if we starved him, as if his dish at home was not generally half full, though we've tried so hard to find out what he likes," said May plaintively. If otherwise engaged it would be in chasing cats, running down fowls, barking at message boys—to whom he had the greatest antipathy—or, most serious foible of all, threatening to engage in single combat with dogs twice his size and three times his age.

There is no accounting for tastes, seeing that these tumultuous walks were the delight of May's days, and that even Dora, with her inveterate sympathy, enjoyed them, though they deranged somewhat her sense of maidenly dignity and decorum. It was to be hoped that as Tray grew in years he would grow in discretion, and would show a little forbearance to the friends who were so forbearing to him.

Tray, Dora, and May had gone on their customary expedition. The human beings of the party were inclined to direct their steps as quickly as possible to one of the country roads. Tray's eccentricities at the present stage of his development were hardly calculated for the comfortable traversing of a succession of streets and lanes. But the canine leader of the party decided for the main street, and Dora and May gave up their own inclinations, and followed in his erratic track with their wonted cheerful submission.

It was a fine October afternoon, when Redcross was looking its best. It was rather a dull town, with little trade and few manufactories, but its worst enemy could not deny it the corresponding virtues of cleanliness and freedom from smoke. Here and there there was a grand old tree wedged between the houses. In one or two instances, where the under part of the house was brick, and the upper—an afterthought—was a projecting storey of wood, the latter was built round the tree, with its branches sheltering the roof in a picturesque, half foreign fashion. Here and there were massive old houses and shops, with some approach to the size and the substantial—even costly—fittings of "Robinson's." A side street led down to a little sluggish canal which joined the Dewes, a river of considerable size on which Redcross had originally been built. This canal was crossed by a short solid stone bridge, bearing a quaint enough bridge-house, still used as a dwelling-place.

The sun was bright and warm without any oppressive heat. The leaves, where leaves were to be seen, had yellow, russet, and red streaks and stains, suggestive of brown nuts and scarlet berries in the hedges.

The flowers in the many window-boxes in which Redcross indulged were still, for the most part, gay with the deeper tints of autumn, the purple of asters and the orange of chrysanthemums setting off the geraniums blossoming on till the frost shrivelled them, and the seeded green and straw-coloured spikes of the still fragrant mignonette.

It was market-day, which gave but a slight agreeable stir to the drowsy town. The ruddy faces and burly figures of farmers, whose imposing bulk somehow did not decrease in keeping with the attenuated profits of long-continued agricultural depression, were prominent on the pavement. Little market carts, which closely shawled and bonneted elderly women, laden with their market baskets, still found themselves disengaged enough to drive, rattled over the cobble stones. An occasional farm labourer in a well-nigh exploded smock frock, who had come in with a bullock or two, or a small flock of sheep, to the slaughter-house, trudging home with a straw between his teeth, and his faithful collie at his heels, made a variety in the town population.

The latter consisted, at this hour, of shop boys and girls, boys from the grammar school, a file of boarders from Miss Burridge's, who walked as if "eyes right" and "eyes left" were the only motion permitted to them, notwithstanding May's frantic signs to them to behold and admire Tray's gambols; a professional man, or a tradesman, leisurely doing a business errand; one or two ladies carrying the latest fashion in card-cases, suggestive of afternoon calls.