’I beg you’ll do no such thing.  Remember the misfortunes that ensued; and besides, I can’t spare Margaret.’

’No; on second thoughts, we’ll have her to nurse us ten years hence, when we shall be two cross old invalids.  Seriously, Hale!  I wish you’d leave Milton; which is a most unsuitable place for you, though it was my recommendation in the first instance.  If you would; I’d swallow my shadows of doubts, and take a college living; and you and Margaret should come and live at the parsonage—­you to be a sort of lay curate, and take the unwashed off my hands; and she to be our housekeeper—­the village Lady Bountiful—­by day; and read us to sleep in the evenings.  I could be very happy in such a life.  What do you think of it?’

‘Never!’ said Mr. Hale, decidedly.  ’My one great change has been made and my price of suffering paid.  Here I stay out my life; and here will I be buried, and lost in the crowd.’

’I don’t give up my plan yet.  Only I won’t bait you with it any more just now.  Where’s the Pearl?  Come, Margaret, give me a farewell kiss; and remember, my dear, where you may find a true friend, as far as his capability goes.  You are my child, Margaret.  Remember that, and ‘God bless you!’

So they fell back into the monotony of the quiet life they would henceforth lead.  There was no invalid to hope and fear about; even the Higginses—­so long a vivid interest—­seemed to have receded from any need of immediate thought.  The Boucher children, left motherless orphans, claimed what of Margaret’s care she could bestow; and she went pretty often to see Mary Higgins, who had charge of them.  The two families were living in one house:  the elder children were at humble schools, the younger ones were tended, in Mary’s absence at her work, by the kind neighbour whose good sense had struck Margaret at the time of Boucher’s death.  Of course she was paid for her trouble; and indeed, in all his little plans and arrangements for these orphan children, Nicholas showed a sober judgment, and regulated method of thinking, which were at variance with his former more eccentric jerks of action.  He was so steady at his work, that Margaret did not often see him during these winter months; but when she did, she saw that he winced away from any reference to the father of those children, whom he had so fully and heartily taken under his care.  He did not speak easily of Mr. Thornton.

‘To tell the truth,’ said he, ’he fairly bamboozles me.  He’s two chaps.  One chap I knowed of old as were measter all o’er.  T’other chap hasn’t an ounce of measter’s flesh about him.  How them two chaps is bound up in one body, is a craddy for me to find out.  I’ll not be beat by it, though.  Meanwhile he comes here pretty often; that’s how I know the chap that’s a man, not a measter.  And I reckon he’s taken aback by me pretty much as I am by him; for he sits and listens and stares, as if I were some strange beast newly caught in some of the zones.  But I’m none daunted.  It would take a deal to daunt me in my own house, as he sees.  And I tell him some of my mind that I reckon he’d ha’ been the better of hearing when he were a younger man.’