ee, though it looked no longer into her own. The voice
was not failing, and the words still came, clear as ever. "I kissed her
in her crib, and I would have kissed her yet once more, but I dared not.
So I said to myself:--'She will wake and never see me! But Phoebe will
be there, to kiss her when she wakes. She will kiss her for me, just on
the place we used to say was good to kiss.' Tell me, Phoebe, did my
child cry much?..."

Granny Marrable's words:--"I cannot--I cannot--my darling!" caught in
her voice, as she bent over the face that, but for its frail
attenuation, was her own face over again, touching it tenderly with her
own old lips--the same, thought Gwen, that had inherited that place it
was so good to kiss, on that baby face of half a century ago, now a
grandmother's. She rose noiselessly from where she half sat, half
leaned, beside the figure on the bed, and stole a little way apart; not
so far as to be unable to hear what that musical voice kept on saying,
though she could not catch the replies.

"I said to myself:--'Phoebe will be her mother when I am miles away
across the sea, and she will be as good a mother as I....' Was it not
best, dearest, I should go alone, rather than carry my child away and
leave all the loneliness for you?... Yes--but my heart ached for my
little one on the great ship.... I would watch the stars--the very stars
you saw too, Phoebe--and they were like friends for many a long week,
till they sank down in the sea behind us, and it was thirty years before
I saw them again.... Yes--then I knew it would be England soon and I
would know if Phoebe had any other grave than the cold sea.... Yes, my
darling, that was my first thought--to go to the little church by
Darenth Mill, and look in the south corner.... I did, and there was
mother's grave, and father's name cut on the stone, but none other. So I
thought:--They are all gone--all gone!... Oh, if I had known that you
were here!..."

The sound of lamentation barely grew in her voice, but it was there. To
turn her mind from the recollection that provoked it, Granny Marrable
thought it well to say that Nicholas Cropredy, her first husband, whom
the forged letter had drowned at sea, had not been buried at Darenth
Mill, but at Ingatestone, with his kindred and ancestors. "Did they find
his body?" said old Maisie. She knew that he was dead long years back,
but had not received any new impression of the cause of his death.

She did not even