vement, there was no denying. When, at last, they had
toiled to the top, fighting their way, not only through the obscurity,
but through an atmosphere of ham and cheese which almost choked Phoebe,
the old lady was speechless with the exertion, though the air was to her
as the air of Paradise. Phoebe placed her on a chair and undid her
bonnet-strings, and for a minute was really alarmed. Mrs. Tom, however,
took it with perfect equanimity.

"She's blown a bit; she ain't as young as she was, nor even as she
thinks for," said that sympathetic person. "Come, Granny, cheer up. Them
stairs ain't strange to you. What's the good of making a fuss? Sit down
and get your breath," she went on, pulling forward a chair; then turning
to Phoebe, she shrugged her shoulders and raised her eyebrows. "She's
breaking fast, that's what it is," said Mrs. Tom under her breath, with
a nod of her head.

"This is the room as your mother spent most of her life in when she was
like you," said Mrs. Tozer, when she regained her breath. "It was here
as she met your father first. The first time I set my eyes on him,
'That's the man for my Phoebe,' I said to myself; and sure enough, so it
turned out."

"You didn't miss no way of helping it on, neither, granny, if folks do
you justice," said Mrs. Tom. "Mothers can do a deal when they exerts
themselves; and now Phoebe has a daughter of her own, I dare be sworn
she's just as clever, throwing the nice ones and the well-off ones in
her way. It's a wonder to me as she hasn't gone off yet, with all her
opportunities--two or three and twenty, ain't you, Miss Phoebe? I should
have thought you'd have married long afore now."

"I stall be twenty my next birthday," said Phoebe. "My cousins are a
great deal younger, I hear; are they at school? I hope I shall see them
before I go."

"Oh, you'll see 'em fast enough," said their mother, "they're 'aving
their music lesson. I don't hold with sending girls to school. I likes
to keep them under my own eye. I suppose I needn't ask you now if you
play?"

"A very little," said Phoebe, who rather piqued herself upon her music,
and who was learned in Bach and Beethoven, and had an opinion of her own
about Wagner. Mrs. Tom brightened visibly, for her girls played not a
little, but a great deal.

"And draw?--but I needn't ask, for living in London, you've got masters
at your very door."

"Not at all, I am sorry to say," said Phoebe, with a pathetic tone of
regret in her