‘Thank you, you’re a good fellow!’ and I rode back almost as quickly as I came.  It was a brain fever.  The doctor said so, when he came in the early summer morning.  I believe we had come to know the nature of the illness in the night-watches that had gone before.  As to hope of ultimate recovery, or even evil prophecy of the probable end, the cautious doctor would be entrapped into neither.  He gave his directions, and promised to come again; so soon, that this one thing showed his opinion of the gravity of the case.

By God’s mercy she recovered, but it was a long, weary time first.  According to previously made plans, I was to have gone home at the beginning of August.  But all such ideas were put aside now, without a word being spoken.  I really think that I was necessary in the house, and especially necessary to the minister at this time; my father was the last man in the world, under such circumstances, to expect me home.

I say, I think I was necessary in the house.  Every person (1 had almost said every creature, for all the dumb beasts seemed to know and love Phillis) about the place went grieving and sad, as though a cloud was over the sun.  They did their work, each striving to steer clear of the temptation to eye-service, in fulfilment of the trust reposed in them by the minister.  For the day after Phillis had been taken ill, he had called all the men employed on the farm into the empty barn; and there he had entreated their prayers for his only child; and then and there he had told them of his present incapacity for thought about any other thing in this world but his little daughter, lying nigh unto death, and he had asked them to go on with their daily labours as best they could, without his direction.  So, as I say, these honest men did their work to the best of their ability, but they slouched along with sad and careful faces, coming one by one in the dim mornings to ask news of the sorrow that overshadowed the house; and receiving Betty’s intelligence, always rather darkened by passing through her mind, with slow shakes of the head, and a dull wistfulness of sympathy.  But, poor fellows, they were hardly fit to be trusted with hasty messages, and here my poor services came in.  One time I was to ride hard to Sir William Bentinck’s, and petition for ice out of his ice-house, to put on Phillis’s head.  Another it was to Eltham I must go, by train, horse, anyhow, and bid the doctor there come for a consultation, for fresh symptoms had appeared, which Mr Brown, of Hornby, considered unfavour able.  Many an hour have I sate on the window-seat, half-way up the stairs, close by the old clock, listening in the hot stillness of the house for the sounds in the sick-room.  The minister and I met often, but spoke together seldom.  He looked so old—­so old!  He shared the nursing with his wife; the strength that was needed seemed to be given to them both in that day.  They required no one else about their child.  Every office about her was sacred to them; even Betty