em to
have been once on terms of confidential intimacy. Thorndyke, I should
have mentioned, was not a native of these parts: he had answered Mr.
Woodley's advertisement for a bailiff, and his testimonials appearing
satisfactory, he had been somewhat precipitately engaged. A young man,
calling himself Edward Wareing, the son of Elizabeth Wareing, and said to
be engaged in an attorney's office in Liverpool, was also a not
unfrequent visitor at Dale Farm; and once he had the insolent presumption
to address a note to Mary Woodley, formally tendering his hand and
fortune! This, however, did not suit Mr. Thorndyke's views, and Mr.
Edward Wareing was very effectually rebuked and silenced by his proposed
father-in-law.

Mrs. Thorndyke's health rapidly declined. The woman Wareing, touched
possibly by sympathy or remorse, exhibited considerable tenderness and
compassion towards the invalid; made her nourishing drinks, and
administered the medicine prescribed by the village practitioner--who,
after much delay and _pooh, poohing_ by Thorndyke, had been called
in--with her own hands. About three weeks previous to Mrs. Thorndyke's
death, a sort of reconciliation was patched up through her
instrumentality between the husband and wife; and an unwonted expression
of kindness and compassion, real or simulated, sat upon Thorndyke's
features every time he approached the dying woman.

The sands of life ebbed swiftly with Mrs. Thorndyke. Infolded in the
gentle but deadly embrace with which consumption seizes its victims, she
wasted rapidly away; and, most perplexing symptoms of all, violent
retchings and nausea, especially after taking her medicine--which,
according to Davis, the village surgeon, was invariable of a sedative
character--aggravated and confirmed the fatal disease which was hurrying
her to the tomb.

Not once during this last illness could Mary Woodley, by chance or
stratagem, obtain a moment's private interview with her mother, until a
few minutes before her decease. Until then, under one pretence or
another, either Elizabeth Wareing, one of Thorndyke's daughters, or
Thorndyke himself, was always present in the sick-chamber. It was
evening: darkness had for some time fallen: no light had yet been taken
into the dying woman's apartment; and the pale starlight which faintly
illumined the room served, as Mary Woodley softly approached on tiptoe to
the bedside of her, as she supposed, sleeping parent, but to deepen by
defining