e back to
Gravesend, resolving that all this torture should end that night, one
way or other.

Phoebe Dale was the daughter of a farmer in Essex, and one of the
happiest young women in England till she knew Reginald Falcon, Esq.

She was reared on wholesome food, in wholesome air, and used to churn
butter, make bread, cook a bit now and then, cut out and sew all her
own dresses, get up her own linen, make hay, ride anything on four legs;
and, for all that, was a great reader, and taught in the Sunday school
to oblige the vicar; wrote a neat hand, and was a good arithmetician,
kept all the house accounts and farm accounts. She was a musician,
too,--not profound, but very correct. She would take her turn at the
harmonium in church, and, when she was there, you never heard a wrong
note in the bass, nor an inappropriate flourish, nor bad time. She could
sing, too, but never would, except her part in a psalm. Her voice was
a deep contralto, and she chose to be ashamed of this heavenly organ,
because a pack of envious girls had giggled, and said it was like a
man's.

In short, her natural ability and the range and variety of her useful
accomplishments were considerable; not that she was a prodigy; but she
belonged to a small class of women in this island who are not too high
to use their arms, nor too low to cultivate their minds; and, having a
faculty and a habit deplorably rare amongst her sex, viz., Attention,
she had profited by her miscellaneous advantages.

Her figure and face both told her breed at once: here was an old English
pastoral beauty; not the round-backed, narrow-chested cottager, but the
well-fed, erect rustic, with broad, full bust and massive shoulder, and
arm as hard as a rock with health and constant use; a hand finely cut,
though neither small nor very white, and just a little hard inside,
compared with Luxury's soft palm; a face honest, fair, and rather large
than small; not beautiful, but exceedingly comely; a complexion not pink
and white, but that delicately blended brickdusty color, which tints the
whole cheek in fine gradation, outlasts other complexions twenty years,
and beautifies the true Northern, even in old age. Gray, limpid, honest,
point-blank, searching eyes; hair true nut-brown, without a shade of red
or black; and a high, smooth forehead, full of sense. Across it ran
one deep wrinkle that did not belong to her youth. That wrinkle was the
brand of trouble, the line of agony. It had