bbins looked back at my lord with a grin, and his little eyes,
hard to put up with. 'Have you nothing to say, my lord? Then I am
afeared I must ask you just to come along of me.' And my master went
with him, miss, as quiet as a lamb; which Jobbins said, and even Jacob
fancied, was a conscience sign of guilt.

"Now after I have told you all this, Miss Erema, you know very nearly as
much as I do. To tell how the grief was broken to your mother, and what
her state of mind was, and how she sat up on the pillows and cried,
while things went on from bad to worse, and a verdict of 'willful
murder' was brought against your father by the crowner's men, and you
come headlong, without so much as the birds in the ivy to chirp about
you, right into the thick of the worst of it. I do assure you, Miss
Erema, when I look at your bright eyes and clear figure, the Lord in
heaven, who has made many cripples, must have looked down special to
have brought you as you are. For trouble upon trouble fell in heaps,
faster than I can wipe my eyes to think. To begin with, all the servants
but myself and gardener Jacob ran away. They said that the old lord
haunted the house, and walked with his hand in the middle of his heart,
pulling out a bullet if he met any body, and sighing 'murder' three
times, till every hair was crawling. I took it on myself to fetch the
Vicar of the parish to lay the evil spirit, as they do in Wales. A nice
kind gentleman he was as you could see, and wore a velvet skull-cap, and
waited with his legs up. But whether he felt that the power was not
in him, or whether his old lordship was frightened of the Church, they
never made any opportunity between them to meet and have it out, miss.

"Then it seemed as if Heaven, to avenge his lordship, rained down
pestilence upon that house. A horrible disease, the worst I ever met,
broke out upon the little harmless dears, the pride of my heart and of
every body's eyes, for lovelier or better ones never came from heaven.
They was all gone to heaven in a fortnight and three days, and laid in
the church-yard at one another's side, with little beds of mould to the
measure of their stature, and their little carts and drums, as they made
me promise, ready for the judgment-day. Oh, my heart was broken, miss,
my heart was broken! I cried so, I thought I could never cry more.

"But when your dear mother, who knew nothing of all this (for we put all
their illness, by the doctor's orders, away