ARING

Well was it for Phoebe that she had been trained to monotony, for her
life was most uniform after Robert had left home. Her schoolroom
mornings, her afternoons with her mother, her evenings with Mervyn, were
all so much alike that one week could hardly be distinguished from
another. Bertha's vagaries and Mervyn's periodical journeys to London
were the chief varieties, certainly not her mother's plaintiveness, her
brother's discontent, or the sacrifice of her own inclinations, which
were pretty certain to be traversed, but then, as she said, something
else happened that did as well as what she had wished.

One day, when Mervyn had been hunting, and had come home tired, he
desired her to give him some music in the evening. She took the
opportunity of going over some fine old airs, which the exigencies of
drawing-room display had prevented her from practising for some time.
Presently she found him standing by her, his face softer than usual.
'Where did you get that, Phoebe?'

'It is Haydn's. I learnt it just after Miss Fennimore came.'

'Play it again; I have not heard it for years.'

She obeyed, and looked at him. He was shading his face with his hand,
but he hardly spoke again all the rest of the evening.

Phoebe's curiosity was roused, and she tried the effect of the air on her
mother, whose great pleasure was her daughter's music, since a piano had
been moved into her dressing-room. But it awoke no association there,
and 'Thank you, my dear,' was the only requital.

While the next evening she was wondering whether to volunteer it, Mervyn
begged for it, and as she finished, asked, 'What does old Gay say of my
mother now?'

'He thinks her decidedly better, and so I am sure she is. She has more
appetite. She really ate the breast of a partridge to-day!'

'He says nothing of a change?'

'She could not bear the journey.'

'It strikes me that she wants rousing. Shut up in a great lonely house
like this, she has nothing cheerful to look at. She would be much better
off at Brighton, or some of those places where she could see people from
the windows, and have plenty of twaddling old dowager society.'

'I did ask Mr. Gay about the sea, but he thought the fatigue of the
journey, and the vexing her by persuading her to take it, would do more
harm than the change would do good.'

'I did not mean only as a change. I believe she would be much happier
living there, with this great place off her hands.