hope that you will be happy, Mr. Gibson."

"What was I to do, Miss Dorothy? I know that I have been very much
blamed;--but so unfairly! I have never meant to be untrue to a mouse,
Miss Dorothy." Dorothy did not at all understand whether she were the
mouse, or Camilla French, or Arabella. "And it is so hard to find
that one is ill-spoken of because things have gone a little amiss."
It was quite impossible that Dorothy should make any answer to this,
and at last Mr. Gibson left her, assuring her with his last word that
nothing would give him so much pleasure as to be called upon once
more to see his old friend in her last moments.

Though Miss Stanbury had been described as sleeping "like a babby,"
she had heard the footsteps of a strange man in the house, and had
made Martha tell her whose footsteps they were. As soon as Dorothy
went to her, she darted upon the subject with all her old keenness.
"What did he want here, Dolly?"

"He said he would like to see you, aunt,--when you are a little
better, you know. He spoke a good deal of his old friendship and
respect."

"He should have thought of that before. How am I to see people now?"

"But when you are better, aunt--?"

"How do I know that I shall ever be better? He isn't off with those
people at Heavitree,--is he?"

"I hope not, aunt."

"Psha! A poor, weak, insufficient creature;--that's what he is.
Mr. Jennings is worth twenty of him." Dorothy, though she put the
question again in its most alluring form of Christian charity and
forgiveness, could not induce her aunt to say that she would see
Mr. Gibson. "How can I see him, when you know that Sir Peter has
forbidden me to see anybody except Mrs. Clifford and Mr. Jennings?"

Two days afterwards there was an uncomfortable little scene at
Heavitree. It must, no doubt, have been the case, that the same train
of circumstances which had produced Mr. Gibson's visit to the Close,
produced also the scene in question. It was suggested by some who
were attending closely to the matter that Mr. Gibson had already come
to repent his engagement with Camilla French; and, indeed, there were
those who pretended to believe that he was induced, by the prospect
of Miss Stanbury's demise, to transfer his allegiance yet again, and
to bestow his hand upon Dorothy at last. There were many in the city
who could never be persuaded that Dorothy had refused him,--these
being, for the most part, ladies in whose estimation the value of a