ve taken
occasion to say anything she wished. It was clear that she chose to
avoid the subject. Her talk was almost entirely about the sick, for
whom she laboured as strenuously as her strength would permit. She
could not go about among them, nor sit up with the sufferers: but she
cooked good things over her fire for them, all day long; and she took to
her home many children who were too young to be useful, and old enough
to be troublesome in a sick house. Between her cooking, teaching, and
playing with the children, she was as fully occupied as her friends in
the corner-house, and perhaps might not really know anything about Mr
Enderby.

Each one of the family had caught glimpses of him at one time or
another. There was reason to think that he was active among Mr
Walcot's poor patients; and Hope had encountered him more than once in
the course of his rounds, when a few words on the business of the moment
were exchanged, and nothing more happened. Margaret saw him twice: once
on horseback, when he turned suddenly down a lane to avoid her; and at
the Rowlands' dining-room window, with Ned in his arms. She never now
passed that house when she could help it: but this once it was
necessary; and she was glad that Philip had certainly not seen her. His
back was half-turned to the window at the moment, as if some one within
was speaking to him. Each time, his image was so stamped in upon her
mind, that, amidst all the trials of such near neighbourhood without
intercourse, his presence in Deerbrook was, on the whole, certainly a
luxury. She had gained something to compensate for all her
restlessness, in the three glimpses of him with which she had now been
favoured. A thought sometimes occurred to her, of which she was so
ashamed that she made every endeavour to banish it. She asked herself
now and then, whether, if she had been able to sit at home, or take her
accustomed walks, she should not have beheld Philip oftener:--whether
she was not sadly out of the way of seeing him at the cottage in the
lane, and the other sordid places where her presence was necessary. Not
for this occasional question did she stay away one moment longer than
she would otherwise have done from the cottage in the lane; but while
she was there, it was apt to recur.

There she sat one afternoon, somewhat weary, but not dreaming of going
home. There lay the three sick creatures still. The woman was likely
to recover; the boy lingered, an