ert him--oh, no!--she must work for him and
his child.

'Work! Why, Cilla, you have not strength for it.'

'I am quite well. I have strength for anything now I have some one to
work for. Nothing hurts me but loneliness.'

'Folly, child! The same home that receives you will receive them.'

'Nonsense! As if I could throw such a dead weight on any one's hands!'

'Not on _any one's_,' said Mr. Prendergast. 'But I see how it is, Cilla;
you have changed your mind.'

'No,' said Lucilla, with an outbreak of her old impatience; 'but you men
are so selfish! Bothering me about proclaiming all this nonsense, just
when my brother is come home in this wretched state! After all, he was
my brother before anything else, and I have a right to consider him
first!'

'Then, Cilla, you shall be bothered no more,' said Mr. Prendergast,
rising. 'If you want me, well and good--you know where to find your old
friend; if not, and you can't make up your mind to it, why, then we are
as we were in old times. Good-bye, my dear; I won't fret you any more.'

'No,' said he to himself, as he paused in the Court, and was busy wiping
from the sleeve of his coat two broad dashes of wet that had certainly
not proceeded from the clouds, 'the dear child's whole heart is with her
brother now she has got him back again. I'll not torment her any more.
What a fool I was to think that anything but loneliness could have made
her accept me--poor darling! I think I'll go out to the Bishop of Sierra
Leone!'

'What can have happened to him?' thought Phoebe, as he strode past the
little party on their walk to the Tower. 'Can that wretched little Cilly
have been teasing him? I am glad Robert has escaped from her clutches!'

However, Phoebe had little leisure for such speculations in the
entertainment of witnessing her companion's intelligent interest in all
that he saw. The walk itself--for which she had begged--was full of
wonder; and the Tower, which Robert's slight knowledge of one of the
officials enabled them to see in perfection, received the fullest
justice, both historically and loyally. The incumbent of St. Matthew's
was so much occupied with explanations to his boys, that Phoebe had the
stranger all to herself, and thus entered to the full into that
unfashionable but most heart-stirring of London sights, 'the Towers of
Julius,' from the Traitors' Gate, where Elizabeth sat in her lion-like
desolation, to her effigy in her glory upon Til