lay over her shoulders. No one was
present from St. Ignace, but a good deal of talk might have been heard
which signified that Miss Clairville was still the interesting central
figure of the neighbourhood.

"She spends very little time, they tell me, with the child yonder,
although it is her brother's own. The child sits in one room and her
aunt in another; one draws pictures of every mortal thing, and some
things not mortal, and the other looks out of window and rarely speaks.
'Tis a sad sight, they say, that members of one family are thus as far
removed in feeling and ways of talking as--as----" the speaker paused
in perplexity, vainly searching for a suitable and sufficiently strong
simile.

"What can ye expect, ma'am?" said Enderby loftily, with his habitual
consideration for the aristocracy. "Miss Clairville has been cruelly
treated. Her brother to marry, to marry, look you, ma'am, with one of
a menial family--'twas hard on one by nature so genteel, and the manner
of her long sickness was not to be wondered at; had she only gone
through the form of marriage with the one her heart was interested in
and then lost him the next moment; I think I may say, without fear of
exaggeration, she would then have had something to live for; she could
have claimed his money. But no marriage, no man, no money--and in
place of it all, sickness and poverty and the care of the unwelcome
child--why, I've never known a harder thing!"

Crabbe's expectations had often been referred to among the villagers
and had grown to astonishing dimensions in the minds of the simple, but
the idea of Miss Clairville's share in them was new and afforded plenty
of material for conjecture.

"Though what a lone thing like her would have done with all that money,
I cannot think!" said Mrs. Enderby, who in company with Mrs. Abercorn
had always harboured a suspicious and jealous dislike of the handsome
and dashing Pauline.

"Cannot think!" echoed her husband. "Why, them's the ones to know what
to do with any power of money coming to them. I'll warrant she has had
plans enough, to keep the old place up, maybe, to dress herself and
travel to foreign lands and never act no more. That would all take
money, bless ye! Before I settled here, as some of ye know, I kept
butcher shop in Blandville, a bigger place far, than this, all English
and all so pleasant too, so--so equalizing like, that when parties did
run into debt (and some were pretty deep in