school, a few doors only from his aunt's.
He was certainly the least to be pitied in the children's somewhat
lonely life, for his sisters were devoted to him, and their affection
made up to him for the absence of other love. Yet this sounds too severe
on Miss Mildmay, who in her own undemonstrative way _did_ love her
nephew and nieces. But she had mapped out her life on lines independent
of home ties, and she had not the breadth and nobility of nature to
recognise that the charge unexpectedly laid upon her was as much a
heaven-sent mission as the labours among the poor, which she fulfilled
with such devotion and enthusiastic self-denial. Her 'duty,' her dry
duty, she performed to the children, but it never entered her mind or
imagination that more than this could, under the circumstances, be
demanded of her.

'Oh yes,' Eugene replied. 'I'm game for as many miles as you girls, any
way.'

His sisters burst out laughing. Their seven-years' old brother was
developing fast.

'Where shall we go to, then?' said Jacinth, as they rang at their own
door. 'I hope Phebe will be "game" too, Eugene, for we can't go without
her, and she doesn't love very long walks.'

But Phebe proved to be in an unusually enterprising mood. She was a very
good-natured girl, honest and well-principled, her only important fault
being laziness, which her young charges did their best to conceal from
Miss Mildmay.

'Aunt Alison would _certainly_ send her away, if she knew how late Phebe
sometimes calls us in the morning,' Jacinth used to say. 'There's
nothing that would vex her more than laziness, and it is very tiresome.
But then, very likely, she'd get us some prim maid that would be
ill-natured and crabbed, and perhaps not _really_ as good as Phebe.'

So, though they shook the terrors of a probable dismissal over the
delinquent's head, they made no further complaint. And every time Phebe
had been specially in fault, she was so exceedingly penitent that she
almost persuaded her young mistresses as well as herself that it would
never happen again.

She had been very late that Friday morning, and in consequence was now
doubly on the alert. Not only did she profess herself equal to walking
ten miles if the young ladies wished it, but she undertook to carry
Master Eugene pick-a-back, should he feel tired, a proposal which did
not find favour in Master Eugene's eyes, though her next suggestion that
she should escort the party to a lovely wood they