Miss Matty became my new hostess.  At first I rather dreaded the changed aspect of things.  Miss Matty, too, began to cry as soon as she saw me.  She was evidently nervous from having anticipated my visit.  I comforted her as well as I could, and I found the best consolation I could give was the honest praise that came from my heart as I spoke of the deceased.

Miss Matty made me her confidante in many matters, and one evening she sent Martha to go for eggs at a farm at the other end of the town and told me the story of her brother.

“Poor Peter!  The sole honour he brought from Shrewsbury was the reputation of being captain of the school in the art of practical joking.  He even thought that the people of Cranford might be hoaxed.  ‘Hoaxing’ is not a pretty word, my dear, and I hope you won’t tell your father I used it, for I should not like him to think I was not choice in my language, after living with such a woman as Deborah.  I don’t know how it slipped out of my mouth, except it was that I was thinking of poor Peter, and it was always his expression.

“One day my father had gone to see some sick people in the village.  Deborah, too, was away from home for a fortnight or so.  I don’t know what possessed poor Peter, but he went to her room and dressed himself in her old gown and shawl and bonnet.  And he made the pillow into a little—­you are sure you locked the door, my dear?—­into—­into a little baby with white long clothes.  And he went and walked up and down in the Filbert Walk—­just half hidden by the rails and half seen; and he cuddled the pillow just like a baby and talked to it all the nonsense people do.  Oh, dear, and my father came stepping stately up the street, as he always did, and pushing past the crowd saw—­I don’t know what he saw—­but old Clare said his face went grey-white with anger.  He seized hold of poor Peter, tore the clothes off his back—­bonnet, shawl, gown, and all—­threw them among the crowd, and before all the people lifted up his cane and flogged Peter.

“My dear, that boy’s trick on that sunny day, when all promised so well, broke my mother’s heart and changed my father for life.  Old Clare said Peter looked as white as my father and stood still as a statue to be flogged.

“‘Have you done enough, sir?’ he asked hoarsely, when my father stopped.  Then Peter bowed grandly to the people outside the railing and walked slowly home.  He went straight to his mother, looking as haughty as any man, and not like a boy.

“‘Mother,’ he said, ‘I am come to say “God bless you for ever."’

“He would say no more, and by the time my mother had found out what had happened from my father, and had gone to her boy’s room to comfort him, he had gone, and did not come back.  That spring day was the last time he ever saw his mother’s face.  He wrote a passionate entreaty to her to come and see him before his ship left the Mersey for the war, but the letter was delayed, and when she arrived it was too late.  It killed my mother.  And think, my dear, the day after her death—­for she did not live a twelve-month after Peter left—­came a parcel from India from her poor boy.  It was a large, soft white India shawl.  Just what my mother would have liked.