dear Howell!' I sat behind the curtain while she was speaking to Miss
Miskin--sometimes so faintly that Nanny had to repeat her words, to make
them heard as far as the door."

"That selfish wretch--Miss Miskin!"

"It was very moving, I assure you, to hear not one word of reproach,--or
even notice of Miss Miskin's desertion in this illness. What was said
was common-place enough; but every word was kind. I have it all. I
took it down with my pencil, behind the curtain; for I was sure Miss
Miskin would never remember it. Mrs Howell went on till she came to
directions about the bullfinch that her poor dear Howell used to laugh
to see perched upon her nightcap of a morning; and then she grew
unintelligible. I thought she was only fainting; but while we were
trying to revive her, Nanny said she was going. Miss Miskin drew back
into the passage, shut the door, and made her escape. Her friend looked
that way once more, and said that we had all been very good to her. She
mentioned her husband, as I told you, and then died very quietly."

"Miss Miskin knows, of course?"

"I told her, and did not pretend to feel much sympathy in her
lamentations. I told her she had lost a friend who would have watched
over her, I believed, till her last breath, if she had been the one
attacked by the fever."

"What did she say?"

"She exclaimed a great deal about how good we all were, and wondered
what Deerbrook would have done without us; and said she was sure I was
too kind to think of leaving her in the house with the corpse, with only
Nanny. When I declined passing the night there, she comforted herself
with thinking aloud that her friend would not haunt her--certainly would
not haunt her--as she _had_ gone to her room at last. Her final
question was, how soon I thought it likely that she should feel the
fever coming on, in case of her having caught it, after all, by going
into the room."

"What an end to a sentimental friendship of so many years!"

"I rather expect to hear in the morning that she has taken refuge in
some neighbour's house, and left Nanny alone with the corpse to-night."

"My husband's knock!" cried Hester, starting up. "How is your headache,
love?" asked she anxiously, as she met him at the room door.

"Gone, quite gone," he replied. "I must step down into the surgery for
a minute, about this poor little girl's medicine; and then I have a
great deal to tell you."

The sisters sat in perfect silenc