rture at
his age, with his shattered constitution, and over what was to become of
herself, left behind with the frivolous, unreasonable young stepmother
with whom Fanny had never been able to agree.

The Millars were still in the old quaintly spacious house with its great
bowery garden, for the plausible reason that Dr. Millar could not, on
the spur of the moment, find a purchaser or an available tenant. He took
some credit to himself for having more breadth of view and controlling
common sense than poor Mrs. Carey, otherwise he might have rushed off
and crammed his family into a small inconvenient house, for which, at
the same time, he would have had to pay rent, that was not called for,
unless in the form of rates and taxes, where his old house was
concerned. There might be something to say on the other side of the
question, but as yet that had not occurred to Dr. and Mrs. Millar.
However, the Doctor's brougham, like the Rector's phaeton, was a thing
of the past. He trudged manfully on foot to his patients. There are few
evils which do not offer some compensations. It really seemed as if the
Doctor's deprivation, which weighed heavily on his wife's mind, served
to divert it from other trials, by the degree to which it was occupied
in looking after her husband's changes of coats and boots, in order to
ward off evil consequences to his health.

The four girls were so engrossed with what had happened and was going to
happen to them from the failure of Mr. Carey's bank, that they had
largely lost sight of the first wooer in the family. This was strong
evidence of the extent to which their minds were filled by the rapid
descent of what they called poverty on themselves and their neighbours.
Rose and May ceased to have qualms of conscience when they caught sight
of Tom Robinson fishing in the Dewes, not knowing what desperate
promptings of despair might not suddenly lay hold of a rejected and
forlorn lover. They left off glancing covertly at him in his pew at
church, for the purpose of detecting the earliest symptoms of a broken
heart and a galloping consumption. Instead they speculated on whether
Bell Hewett would have had a new hat if it had not been for the bank's
failure; and whether her brother's absence from home was owing to his
having gone to London for the first look at the columns of the
advertising newspapers, and that he might be on the spot to apply in
person at the addresses given, and to haunt the agency off