Mr. Gibson did not speak much about the grief at the loss of his wife, which it is to be supposed that he felt.  Indeed, he avoided all demonstration of sympathy, and got up hastily and left the room when Miss Phoebe Browning first saw him after his loss, and burst into an uncontrollable flood of tears, which threatened to end in hysterics.  Miss Browning afterwards said she never could forgive him for his hard-heartedness on that occasion; but a fortnight afterwards she came to very high words with old Mrs. Goodenough, for gasping out her doubts whether Mr. Gibson was a man of deep feeling; judging by the narrowness of his crape hat-band, which ought to have covered his hat, whereas there was at least three inches of beaver to be seen.  And, in spite of it all, Miss Browning and Miss Phoebe considered themselves as Mr. Gibson’s most intimate friends, in right of their regard for his dead wife, and would fain have taken a quasi-motherly interest in his little girl, had she not been guarded by a watchful dragon in the shape of Betty, her nurse, who was jealous of any interference between her and her charge; and especially resentful and disagreeable towards all those ladies who, by suitable age, rank, or propinquity, she thought capable of ‘casting sheep’s eyes at master.’

Several years before the opening of this story, Mr. Gibson’s position seemed settled for life, both socially and professionally.  He was a widower, and likely to remain so; his domestic affections were centred on little Molly, but even to her, in their most private moments, he did not give way to much expression of his feelings; his most caressing appellation for her was ‘Goosey,’ and he took a pleasure in bewildering her infant mind with his badinage.  He had rather a contempt for demonstrative people, arising from his medical insight into the consequences to health of uncontrolled feeling.  He deceived himself into believing that still his reason was lord of all, because he had never fallen into the habit of expression on any other than purely intellectual subjects.  Molly, however, had her own intuitions to guide her.  Though her papa laughed at her, quizzed her, joked at her, in a way which the Miss Brownings called ‘really cruel’ to each other when they were quite alone, Molly took her little griefs and pleasures, and poured them into her papa’s ears, sooner even than into Betty’s, that kind-hearted termagant.  The child grew to understand her father well, and the two had the most delightful intercourse together—­half banter, half seriousness, but altogether confidential friendship.  Mr. Gibson kept three servants; Betty, a cook, and a girl who was supposed to be housemaid, but who was under both the elder two, and had a pretty life of it in consequence.  Three servants would not have been required if it had not been Mr. Gibson’s habit, as it had been Mr. Hall’s before him, to take two ‘pupils,’ as they were called in the genteel language of Hollingford, ‘apprentices,’ as they were in fact—­being