s you wouldn't hear the breath out of her above her
own swait nathural voice."

"I've driv' her since iver--" began Richard; but he was going to say
since ever she was married, but he remembered that this allusion
would be unbecoming, so he turned his face to the door-post, and
began to wail bitterly.

And then Herbert shook hands with them all, and it was pretty to see
how the girls wiped their hands in their aprons before they gave them
to him, and how they afterwards left the room with their aprons up to
their faces. The women walked out first, and then the men, hanging
down their heads, and muttering as they went, each some little prayer
that fortune and prosperity might return to the house of Fitzgerald.
The property might go, but according to their views Herbert was
always, and always would be, the head of the house. And then, last of
all, Richard went. "There ain't one of 'em, Mr. Herbert, as wouldn't
guv his fist to go wid yer, and think nothing about the wages."

He was to start very early, and his packing was all completed that
night. "I do so wish we were going with you," said Emmeline, sitting
in his room on the top of a corded box, which was to follow him by
some slower conveyance.

"And I do so wish I was staying with you," said he.

"What is the good of staying here now?" said she; "what pleasure can
there be in it? I hardly dare to go outside the house door for fear I
should be seen."

"But why? We have done nothing that we need be ashamed of."

"No; I know that. But, Herbert, do you not find that the pity of the
people is hard to bear? It is written in their eyes, and meets one at
every turn."

"We shall get rid of that very soon. In a few months we shall be
clean forgotten."

"I do not know about being forgotten."

"You will be as clean forgotten,--as though you had never existed.
And all these servants who are now so fond of us, in three months'
time will be just as fond of Owen Fitzgerald, if he will let them
stay here; it's the way of the world."

That Herbert should have indulged in a little morbid misanthropy on
such an occasion was not surprising. But I take leave to think that
he was wrong in his philosophy; we do make new friends when we lose
our old friends, and the heart is capable of cure as is the body;
were it not so, how terrible would be our fate in this world! But we
are so apt to find fault with God's goodness to us in this respect,
arguing, of others if not of ourselves