berry bush, or leading their songs
and hymns, was felicity indescribable to Maria. She learnt each name,
and, with the reiteration that no one could endure save Phoebe and
faithful Lieschen, rehearsed the individual alphabetical acquirements of
every one; she painted pictures for them, hemmed pinafores, and was
happier than she had ever been in her life, as well as less fretful and
more manageable, and she even began to develop more sense and
intelligence in this direction than she had seemed capable of under the
dreary round of lessons past her comprehension.

It was a great stimulus to Phoebe, and spurred her to personal parish
work, going beyond the soup and subscriptions that might have bounded her
charities for want of knowing better. Of course the worst and most
plausible people took her in, and Miss Charlecote sometimes scolded,
sometimes laughed at her, but the beginning was made, and Robert was
pleased.

Mervyn did bring home some shooting friends, but he made no difficulties
as to the seclusion that Miss Charlecote had recommended for his sister;
accepting it so easily that Phoebe thought he must have intended it from
the first. From that time he was seldom at home without one or more
guests--an arrangement that kept the young ladies chiefly to the west
wing, and always, when in the garden, forced them to be on their guard
against stumbling upon smoking gentlemen. It was a late-houred, noisy
company, and the sounds that reached the sisters made the younger girls
curious, and the governess anxious. Perhaps it was impossible that girls
of seventeen and fifteen should not be excited by the vicinity of
moustaches and beards whom they were bidden to avoid; and even the
alternate French and German which Miss Fennimore enforced on Bertha more
strongly than ever, merely produced the variety of her descanting on
their _knebelbarten_, or on _l'heure a guelle les voix de ces
messieurs-la entonnaient sur le grand escalier_, till Miss Fennimore
declared that she would have Latin and Greek talked if there were no word
for a gentleman in either! There were always stories to be told of
Bertha's narrow escapes of being overtaken by them in garden or corridor,
till Maria, infected by the panic, used to flounder away as if from a
beast of prey, and being as tall as, and considerably stouter than,
Phoebe, with the shuffling gait of the imbecile, would produce a volume
of sound that her sister always feared might attract no