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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Rachel Gray, by Julia Kavanagh
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Rachel Gray
+
+
+Author: Julia Kavanagh
+
+
+
+Release Date: May 18, 2011  [eBook #36160]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RACHEL GRAY***
+
+
+Julia Kavanagh (1824-1877), Rachel Gray (1855), 1856 Tauchnitz edition
+
+Produced by Daniel FROMONT
+
+
+
+
+
+
+COLLECTION
+OF
+BRITISH AUTHORS.
+
+VOL. CCCXLIV.
+
+
+
+
+RACHEL GRAY BY JULIA KAVANAGH.
+
+
+IN ONE VOLUME.
+
+
+
+
+RACHEL GRAY.
+
+
+A TALE
+
+
+FOUNDED ON FACT.
+
+
+BY JULIA KAVANAGH,
+
+
+AUTHOR or "NATHALIE," "DAISY BURNS," "GRACE LEE."
+
+
+
+_COPYRIGHT EDITION_.
+
+
+
+LEIPZIG
+
+
+BERNHARD TAUCHNITZ
+
+
+1856
+
+
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE.
+
+
+
+This tale, as the title-page implies, is founded on fact. Its truth is
+its chief merit, and the Author claims no other share in it, than that of
+telling it to the best of her power.
+
+I do not mean to aver that every word is a positive and literal truth,
+that every incident occurred exactly as I have related it, and in no
+other fashion, but this I mean to say: that I have invented nothing in
+the character of Rachel Gray, and that the sorrows of Richard Jones are
+not imaginary sorrows.
+
+My purpose in giving this story to the world is twofold. I have found
+that my first, and in many respects, most imperfect work "Madeleine," is
+nevertheless that which has won the greatest share of interest and
+sympathy; a result which I may, I think, safely attribute to its truth,
+and which has induced me to believe that on similar grounds, a similar
+distinction might be awarded to a heroine very different indeed from
+"Madeleine," but whose silent virtues have perhaps as strong a claim to
+admiration and respect.
+
+I had also another purpose, and though I mention it last, it was that
+which mainly contributed to make me intrude on public attention; I wished
+to show the intellectual, the educated, the fortunate, that minds which
+they are apt to slight as narrow, that lives which they pity as moving in
+the straight and gloomy paths of mediocrity, are often blessed and graced
+beyond the usual lot, with those lovely aspirations towards better deeds
+and immortal things, without which life is indeed a thing of little
+worth; cold and dull as a sunless day.
+
+
+
+JULIA KAVANAGH.
+
+
+
+LONDON:
+DECEMBER 1855.
+
+
+
+RACHEL GRAY.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+In one of the many little suburbs which cling to the outskirts of London,
+there is a silent and grass-grown street, of aspect both quiet and
+quaint. The houses are crazy, old, and brown, of every height and every
+size; many are untenanted. Some years ago one was internally destroyed by
+fire. It was not thought worth rebuilding. There it still stands, gaunt
+and grim, looking for all the world, with its broken or dust-stained
+windows, like a town deserted after a sacking.
+
+This street is surrounded by populous courts and alleys, by stirring
+thoroughfares, by roads full of activity and commerce; yet somehow or
+other, all the noise of life, all its tumult and agitation, here seem to
+die away to silence and repose. Few people, even amongst the poor, and
+the neighbourhood is a poor one, care to reside in it, while they can be
+lodged as cheaply close by, and more to their taste. Some think that the
+old square at the end, with its ancient, nodding trees, is close and
+gloomy; others have heard strange noises in the house that has suffered
+from fire, and are sure it is haunted; and some again do not like the
+silent, deserted look of the place, and cannot get over the fancy that,
+if no one will live in it, it must be because it is unlucky. And thus it
+daily decays more and more, and daily seems to grow more silent.
+
+The appearance of the few houses that are inhabited, says little in
+favour of this unfortunate street. In one, a tailor has taken up his
+abode. He is a pale, serious man, who stitches at his board in the
+window the whole day long, cheered by the occasional song of a thrush,
+hopping in its osier cage. This tailor, Samuel Hopkins yclept, lives by
+repairing damaged vestments. He once made a coat, and boasts--with how
+much truth is known to his own heart--that he likewise cut out,
+fashioned, and fitted, a pair of blue nether garments. Further on, at the
+corner of the square, stands the house of Mrs. Adams, an aged widow, who
+keeps a small school, which, on her brass board, she emphatically
+denominates her "Establishment for Young Ladies." This house has an
+unmistakeable air of literary dirt and neglect; the area and kitchen
+windows are encumbered with the accumulated mud and dust of years; from
+the attic casement, a little red-haired servant-girl is ever gaping; and
+on hot summer afternoons, when the parlour windows are left open, there
+is a glimpse within of a dingy school-mistress, and still more dingy
+school-room, with a few pupils who sit straggling on half-a-dozen
+benches, conning their lessons with a murmuring hum.
+
+With one exception, there is no other sign of commerce, trade, or
+profession in the whole street. For all an outward glance can reveal to
+the contrary, the people who live there are so very rich that they do not
+need to work at all, or so very genteel in their decay, that if they do
+work, they must do it in a hidden, skulking, invisible sort of fashion,
+or else be irretrievably disgraced.
+
+The solitary exception to which we have alluded, exists, or rather
+existed, for though we speak in the present, we write in the past by some
+years, in one of the smallest houses in the street. A little six-roomed
+house it was, exactly facing the dreary haunted mansion, and exposed to
+all the noises aforesaid. It was, also, to say the truth, an abode of
+poor and mean aspect. In the window hung a dress-maker's board, on which
+was modestly inscribed, with a list of prices, the name of--
+
+
+"RACHEL GRAY."
+
+
+It was accompanied with patterns of yellow paper sleeves, trimmed in
+every colour, an old book of fashions, and beautiful and bright, as if
+reared in wood or meadow, a pot of yellow crocuses in bloom. They were
+closing now, for evening was drawing in, and they knew the hour.
+
+They had opened to light in the dingy parlour within, and which we will
+now enter. It was but a little room, and the soft gloom of a spring
+twilight half-filled it. The furniture though poor and old-fashioned, was
+scrupulously clean; and it shone again in the flickering fire-light. A
+few discoloured prints in black frames hung against the walls; two or
+three broken china ornaments adorned the wooden mantel-shelf, which was,
+moreover, decorated with a little dark-looking mirror in a rim of
+tarnished gold.
+
+By the fire an elderly woman of grave and stern aspect, but who had once
+been handsome, sat reading the newspaper. Near the window, two
+apprentices sewed, under the superintendence of Rachel Gray.
+
+A mild ray of light fell on her pale face, and bending figure. She sewed
+on, serious and still, and the calm gravity of her aspect harmonized with
+the silence of the little parlour which nothing disturbed, save the
+ticking of an old clock behind the door, the occasional rustling of Mrs.
+Gray's newspaper, and the continuous and monotonous sound of stitching.
+
+Rachel Gray looked upwards of thirty, yet she was younger by some years.
+She was a tall, thin, and awkward woman, sallow and faded before her
+time. She was not, and had never been handsome, yet there was a patient
+seriousness in the lines of her face, which, when it caught the eye,
+arrested it at once, and kept it long. Her brow, too, was broad and
+intellectual; her eyes were very fine, though their look was dreamy and
+abstracted; and her smile, when she did smile, which was not often, for
+she was slightly deaf and spoke little, was pleasant and very sweet.
+
+She sewed on, as we have said, abstracted and serious, when gradually,
+for even in observation she was slow, the yellow crocuses attracted her
+attention. She looked at them meditatively, and watched them closing,
+with the decline of day. And, at length, as if she had not understood,
+until then, what was going on before her, she smiled and admiringly
+exclaimed:
+
+"Now do look at the creatures, mother!"
+
+Mrs. Gray glanced up from her newspaper, and snuffed rather disdainfully.
+
+"Lawk, Rachel!" she said, "you don't mean to call crocuses creatures--do
+you? I'll tell you what though," she added, with a doleful shake of the
+head, "I don't know what Her Majesty thinks; but I say the country can't
+stand it much longer."
+
+Mrs. Gray had been cook in a Prime Minister's household, and this had
+naturally given her a political turn.
+
+"The Lord has taught you," murmured Rachel, bending over the flowers with
+something like awe, and a glow spread over her sallow cheek, and there
+came a light to her large brown eyes.
+
+Of the two apprentices--one a sickly, fretful girl of sixteen, heard her
+not; she went on sewing, and the very way in which she drew her needle
+and thread was peevish. The other apprentice did hear Rachel, and she
+looked, or rather stared at the dress-maker, with grim wonder. Indeed,
+there was something particularly grim about this young maiden--a drear
+stolidity that defies describing. A pure Saxon she was--no infusion of
+Celtic, or Danish, or Norman blood had lightened the native weight of her
+nature. She was young, yet she already went through life settling
+everything, and living in a moral tower of most uninviting aspect. But
+though Jane settled everything, she did not profess to understand
+everything; and when, as happened every now and then, Rachel Gray came
+out with such remarks as that above recorded, Jane felt confounded. "She
+couldn't make out Miss Gray--that she couldn't."
+
+"I'm so tired!" peevishly said Mary, the fretful apprentice.
+
+At once Rachel kindly observed: "Put by your work, dear."
+
+Again Mrs. Gray snuffed, and came out with: "Lawk! she's always grummy!"
+
+Mary tossed away her work, folded her arms, and looked sullen. Jane, the
+grim apprentice, drew her needle and thread twice as fast as before.
+"Thank Heaven!" she piously thought, "I am not lazy, nor sickly, and I
+can't see much difference between the two--that I can't."
+
+Rachel's work lay in her lap; she sat looking at the crocuses until she
+fell in a dream far in the past.
+
+For the past is our realm, free to all, high or low, who wish to dwell in
+it. There we may set aside the bitterness and the sorrow; there we may
+choose none but the pleasing visions, the bright, sunny spots where it is
+sweet to linger. The Future, fair as Hope may make it, is a dream, we
+claim it in vain. The Present, harsh or delightful, must be endured, yet
+it flies from us before we can say "it is gone." But the Past is ours to
+call up at our will. It is vivid and distinct as truth. In good and in
+evil, it is irrevocable; the divine seal has been set upon it for
+evermore.
+
+In that Book--a pure and holy one was hers--though not without a few
+dark and sad pages--Rachel Gray often read. And now, the sight of the
+yellow flower of spring took her back, to a happy day of her childhood.
+She saw herself a little girl again, with her younger sister Jane, and
+the whole school to which they belonged, out on a holiday treat in a
+green forest. Near that forest there was a breezy field; and there it was
+that Rachel first saw the yellow crocuses bloom. She remembered her joy,
+her delight at the wonderful beauty of the wild field flowers--how she
+and Jane heaped their laps with them, and sat down at the task; and how,
+when tired with the pleasant labour, they rested, as many yellow crocuses
+as before seemed to blow and play in the breeze around them. And she
+remembered, too, how, even then, there passed across her childish mind, a
+silent wonder at their multitude, an undefined awe for the power of the
+Almighty Hand who made the little flower, and bade it bloom in the green
+fields, beneath the misty azure of a soft spring sky.
+
+And then swiftly followed other thoughts. Where was little, blue-eyed
+Jane, her younger sister, her little companion and friend? Sleeping in a
+London grave, far from the pleasant and sunny spots where God's wild
+flowers bloom. And she--why she was pursuing her path in life, doing the
+will of God Almighty.
+
+"And what more," thought Rachel, "can I hope or wish for?"
+
+"Now, Rachel, what are you moping about?" tartly asked her mother, who,
+though half blind, had a quick eye for her daughter's meditative fits.
+
+Abruptly fled the dream. The childish memories, the holy remembrance of
+the dead, sank back once more to their quiet resting-place in Rachel's
+heart. Wakening up with a half-lightened start, she hastily resumed her
+work.
+
+"I don't think there ever was such a moper as that girl," grumbled Mrs.
+Gray to herself.
+
+Rachel smiled cheerfully in her mother's face. But as to telling her that
+she had been thinking of the yellow crocuses, and of the spots they grew
+in, and of the power and greatness and glory of Him who made them, Rachel
+did not dream of it.
+
+"There's Mrs. Brown," said Mrs. Gray, as a dark figure passed by the
+window. "Go, and open the door, Mary."
+
+Mary did not stir, upon which Jane officiously rose and said, "I'll go."
+She went, and in came, or rather bounced, Mrs. Brown--a short, stout,
+vulgar-looking woman of fifty or so, who at once filled the room with
+noise.
+
+"La, Mrs. Gray!" she began breathlessly, "What do you think? There's a
+new one. I have brought you the paper; third column, second page, first
+article, 'The Church in a Mess.' I thought you'd like to see it. Well,
+Rachel, and how are you getting on? Mrs. James's dress don't fit her a
+bit, and she says she'll not give you another stitch of work: but la! you
+don't care--do you? Why, Mary, how yellow you look to day. I declare
+you're as yellow as the crocuses in the pot. Ain't she now, Jane? And so
+you're not married yet--are you, my girl?" she added, giving the grim
+apprentice a slap on the back.
+
+Jane eyed her quietly.
+
+"You'd better not do that again, Mrs. Brown," she said, with some
+sternness, "and as to getting married: why, s'pose you mind your own
+business!"
+
+Mrs. Brown threw herself back in her chair, and laughed until the tears
+ran down her face. When she recovered, it was to address Mrs. Gray.
+
+"La, Mrs. Gray! can't you find it?" she said. "Why, I told you, third
+column, second page, 'The Church in a Mess.' You can't miss. I have put a
+pin in it."
+
+Spite of this kind attention, Mrs. Gray had not found "The Church in a
+Mess."
+
+"Lawk, Mrs. Brown!" she said, impatiently, "where's the use of always
+raking up them sort of things! The badness of others don't make us good--
+does it? It's the taxes I think of, Mrs. Brown; it's the taxes! Now,
+Rachel, where are you going?"
+
+"I am going to take home this work, mother."
+
+Unable to find fault with this, Mrs. Gray muttered to herself. She was
+not ill-natured, but fault-finding was with her an inveterate habit.
+
+"La! what a muff that girl of yours is, Mrs. Gray!" charitably observed
+Mrs. Brown, as Rachel left the room. For Mrs. Brown being Mrs. Gray's
+cousin, landlady, and neighbour, took the right to say everything she
+pleased.
+
+"She ain't particlerly bright," confessed Mrs. Gray, poking the fire,
+"but you see, Mrs. Brown--"
+
+Rachel closed the door, and heard no more. Whilst Mrs. Brown was talking,
+she had been tying up her parcel. She now put on her bonnet and cloak,
+and went out.
+
+It is sweet, after the toil of a day, to breathe fresh air, London air
+even though it should be. It is sweet, after the long closeness of the
+work-room, to walk out and feel the sense of life and liberty. A new
+being seemed poured into Rachel as she went on.
+
+"I wonder people do not like this street," she thought, pausing at the
+corner to look back on the grey, quiet line she was leaving behind. "They
+call it dull, and to me it is so calm and sweet." And she sighed to enter
+the noisy and populous world before her. She hastily crossed it, and only
+slackened her pace when she reached the wide streets, the mansions with
+gardens to them, the broad and silent squares of the west end. She
+stopped before a handsome house, the abode of a rich lady who
+occasionally employed her, because she worked cheaper than a fashionable
+dress-maker, and as well.
+
+Mrs. Moxton was engaged--visitors were with her--Rachel had to wait--
+she sat in the hall. A stylish footman, who quickly detected that she was
+shy and nervous, entertained himself and his companions, by making her
+ten times more so. His speech was rude--his jests were insolent. Rachel
+was meek and humble; but she could feel insult; and that pride, from
+which few of God's creatures are free, rose within her, and flushed her
+pale cheek with involuntary displeasure.
+
+At length, the infliction ceased. Mrs. Moxton's visitors left; Rachel was
+called in. Her first impulse had been to complain of the footman to his
+mistress; but mercy checked the temptation; it might make him lose his
+place. Poor Rachel! she little knew that this footman could have been
+insolent to his mistress herself, had he so chosen. He was six foot
+three, and, in his livery of brown and gold, looked splendid. In short,
+he was invaluable, and not to be parted with on any account.
+
+Mrs. Moxton was habitually a well-bred, good-natured woman; but every
+rule has its exceptions. Rachel found her very much out of temper. To say
+the truth, one of her recent visitors was in the Mrs. Brown style; Mrs.
+Moxton had been provoked and irritated; and Rachel paid for it.
+
+"Now, Miss Gray," she said, with solemn indignation, "what do you mean by
+bringing back work in this style? That flounce is at least an inch too
+high! I thought you an intelligent young person--but really, really!"
+
+"It's very easily altered, ma'am," said Rachel, submissively.
+
+"You need, not trouble," gravely replied Mrs. Moxton. "I owe you
+something; you may call with your bill to-morrow."
+
+"I shall not be able to call to-morrow, ma'am; and if it were convenient
+now--"
+
+"It is not convenient now!" said Mrs. Morton, rather haughtily. She
+thought Rachel the most impertinent creature she had ever met with--that
+is to say, next to that irritating Mrs. Maberly, who had repeated that
+provoking thing about Mr. So-and-So. Rachel sighed and left the house
+like all shy persons, she was easily depressed. It was night when she
+stood once more in the street. Above the pale outline of the houses
+spread a sky of dark azure. A star shone in it, a little star; but it
+burned with as brilliant a light as any great planet. Rachel gazed at it
+earnestly, and the shadow passed away. "What matter!" she thought, "even
+though a man in livery made a jest of me--even though a lady in silk was
+scornful. What matter! God made that star for me as well as for her!
+Besides," she added, checking a thought which might, she feared, be too
+proud, "besides, who, and what am I, that I should repine?"
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+
+
+Rachel went on; but she did not turn homewards. She left the broad and
+airy strait, where Mrs. Moxton lived. She entered a narrow one, long and
+gloomy. It led her into a large and gas-lit square. She crossed it
+without looking right or left: a thought led her on like a spell. Through
+streets and alleys, by lanes and courts--on she went, until at length
+she stood in the heart of a populous neighbourhood. Cars were dashing
+along the pavement; night vendors were screaming at their stalls, where
+tallow lights flared in the night wind. Drunken men were shouting in gin
+palaces, wretched looking women were coming out of pawnbroker's shops,
+and precocious London children were pouring into a theatre, where their
+morals were to be improved, and their understandings were to be
+enlightened, at the moderate rate of a penny a head.
+
+Rachel sighed at all she saw, and divined. "Poor things!" she thought,
+"if they only knew better." But this compassionate feeling did not
+exclude a sort of fear. Rachel kept as much as she could in the gloomy
+part of the streets; she shrank back nervously from every rude group, and
+thus she at length succeeded in attracting the very thing she most wished
+to shun--observation. Three or four women, rushing out of a
+public-house, caught sight of her timid figure. At once, one of
+them--she was more than half-intoxicated--burst out into a loud shouting
+laugh, and, seizing Rachel's arm, swung her round on the pavement.
+
+"Let me go!" said Rachel "I am in a hurry." She trembled from head to
+foot, and vainly tried to put on the appearance of a courage she felt
+not.
+
+"Give me something for drink then," insolently said the woman.
+
+Rachel's momentary fear was already over; she had said to herself, "and
+what can happen to me without God's will?" and the thought had nerved
+her. She looked very quietly at the woman's flushed and bloated face, and
+as quietly she said:
+
+"You have drunk too much already; let me go."
+
+"No I won't," hoarsely replied her tormentor, and she used language
+which, though it could not stain the pure heart of her who heard it,
+brought the blush of anger and shame to her cheek.
+
+"Let me go!" she said, trembling this time with indignation.
+
+"Yes--yes, let the young woman go, Molly," observed one of the woman's
+companions who had hitherto looked on apathetically. She officiously
+disengaged Rachel's arm, whispering as she did so: "You'd better cut
+now--I'll hold her. Molly's awful when she's got them fits on."
+
+Rachel hastened away, followed by the derisive shout of the whole group.
+She turned down the first street she found; it was dark and silent, yet
+Rachel did not stop until she reached the very end of it; then she paused
+to breathe a while, but when she put her hand in her pocket for her
+handkerchief it was gone; with it had disappeared her purse, and two or
+three shillings. Rachel saw and understood it all--the friend of Molly,
+her officious deliverer, was a pick-pocket She hung down her head and
+sighed, dismayed and astonished, not at her loss, but at the sin. "Ah!
+dear Lord Jesus," she thought, full of sorrow, "that thou shouldst thus
+be crucified anew by the sins of thy people!" Then followed the
+perplexing inward question: "Oh! why is there so much sin?" "God knows
+best," was the inward reply, and once more calm and serene, Rachel went
+on. At first, she hardly knew where she was. She stood in a dark
+thoroughfare where three streets met--three narrow streets that scarcely
+broke on the surrounding gloom. Hesitatingly she took the first. It
+happened to be that which she wanted. When Rachel recognized it, her pace
+slackened, her heart beat, her colour came and went, she was much moved;
+she prayed too--she prayed with her whole heart, but she walked very
+slowly. And thus she reached at length a lonely little street not quite
+so gloomy as that which she had been following.
+
+She paused at the corner shop for a moment. It was a second-hand
+ironmonger's; rusty iron locks, and rusty tongs and shovels, and rusty
+goods of every description kept grim company to tattered books and a few
+old pictures, that had contracted an iron look in their vicinity. A
+solitary gas-light lit the whole.
+
+Rachel stopped and looked at the books, and at the pictures, but only for
+a few seconds. If she stood there, it was not to gaze with passing
+curiosity on those objects; she knew them all of old, as she knew every
+stone of that street; it was to wait until the flush of her cheek had
+subsided, and the beating of her heart had grown still.
+
+At length she went on. When she reached the middle of the street she
+paused; she stood near a dark house, shrouded within the gloom of its
+doorway. Opposite her, on the other side of the way, was a small shop lit
+from within. From where she stood, Rachel could see everything that
+passed in that abode. A carpenter lived there, for the place was full of
+rough deal boards standing erect against the wall, and the floor was
+heaped high with shavings. Presently a door within opened, the master of
+the shop entered it, and set himself to work by the light of a tallow
+candle. He was a tall, thin man, grey-headed and deeply wrinkled, but
+strong and hale for his years. As he bent over his work, the light of the
+candle vividly defined his angular figure and sharp features. Rachel
+looked at him; her eyes filled with tears, she brushed them away with her
+hand, for they prevented her from seeing, but they returned thicker and
+faster.
+
+"Oh! my father, my father!" she cried within her heart, "why must I stand
+here in darkness looking at you? why cannot I go in to you, like other
+daughters to their father? why do you not love your child?" Her heart
+seemed full to bursting; her eyes overflowed, her breathing was broken by
+sobs, and in the simple and pathetic words of Scripture, she turned away
+her head, and raised her voice and wept aloud.
+
+Rachel Gray was the daughter of the grey-headed carpenter by a first
+wife; soon after whose death he had married again. Mrs. Gray was his
+second wife, and the mother of his youngest daughter. She was kind in her
+way, but that was at the best a harsh one. Rachel was a timid, retiring
+child, plain, awkward, and sallow, with nothing to attract the eye, and
+little to please the fancy. Mrs. Gray did not use her ill certainly, but
+neither did she give her any great share in her affections. And why and
+how should a step-mother have loved Rachel when her own father did not?
+when almost from her birth she had been to him as though she did not
+exist--as a being who, uncalled for and unwanted, had come athwart his
+life. Never had he, to her knowledge, taken her in his arms, or on his
+knee; never had he kissed or caressed her; never addressed to her one
+word of fondness, or even of common kindness. Neither, it is true, had he
+ill-used nor ill-treated her; he felt no unnatural aversion for his own
+flesh and blood, nothing beyond a deep and incurable indifference. For
+her, his heart remained as a barren and arid soil on which the sweet
+flower of love could never bloom.
+
+There was but one being in this narrow circle who really and fondly loved
+Rachel Gray. And this was Jane, her little half-sister. Rachel was her
+elder by full five years. When she was told one morning that Jane was
+born, she heard the tidings with silent awe, then with eager curiosity,
+climbed up on a chair to peep at the rosy baby fast asleep in its cradle.
+From that day, she had but one thought--her little sister. How describe
+the mingled love and pride with which Rachel received the baby, when it
+was first confided to her care, and when to her was allotted the
+delightful task of dragging about in her arms a heavy, screaming child?
+And who but Rachel found Jane's first tooth? Who but Rachel taught Jane
+to speak; and taught her how to walk? Who else fulfilled for the helpless
+infant and wilful child every little office of kindness and of love,
+until at length there woke in her own childish heart some of that
+maternal fondness born with woman, the feeling whence her deepest woes
+and her highest happiness alike must spring. When her father was unkind,
+when her step-mother was hasty, Rachel turned for comfort to her little
+sister. In her childish caresses, and words, and ways, she found solace
+and consolation. She did not feel it hard that she was to be the slave of
+a spoiled child, to wash, comb, and dress her, to work for her, to carry
+her, to sing to her, to play with her, and that, not when she liked, but
+when it pleased Jane. All this Rachel did not mind--Jane loved her. She
+knew it, she was sure of it; and where there is love, there cannot be
+tyranny.
+
+Thus the two sisters grew up together, until one day, without previous
+warning, Thomas Gray went off to America, and coolly left his wife and
+children behind. Mrs. Gray was a good and an upright woman; she reared
+her husband's child like her own, and worked for both, without ever
+repining at the double burden. When her husband returned to England,
+after three years' absence, Mrs. Gray lost no time in compelling him to
+grant her a weekly allowance for herself, and for the support of her
+children. Thomas Gray could not resist the claim; but he gave what the
+law compelled him to give, and no more. He never returned to live with
+his wife; he never expressed a wish to see either of his daughters.
+
+He had been back some years when little Jane died at thirteen. She died,
+dreaming of heaven, with her hand in that of Rachel, and her head on
+Rachel's bosom. She died, blessing her eldest sister with her last
+breath, with love for her in the last look of her blue eyes, in the last
+smile of her wan lips. It was a happy death-bed--one to waken hope, not
+to call forth sorrow; and yet what became of the life of Rachel when Jane
+was gone? For a long time it was a dreary void--a melancholy succession
+of days and weeks and months, from which the happy light had fled--from
+which something sweet and delightful was gone for ever.
+
+For, though it may be sweeter to love, than to be loved, yet it is hard
+always to give and never to receive in return; and when Jane died, Rachel
+knew well enough that all the love she had to receive upon earth, had
+been given unto her. Like the lost Pleiad, "seen no more below," the
+bright star of her life had left the sky. It burned in other heavens with
+more celestial light; but it shone no longer over her path--to cheer, to
+comfort, to illume.
+
+Mrs. Gray was kind; after her own fashion, she loved Rachel. They had
+grieved and suffered together from the same sorrows, and kindred griefs
+can bind the farthest hearts; but beyond this there was no sympathy
+between them, and Mrs. Gray's affection, such as it was, was free from a
+particle of tenderness.
+
+She was not naturally a patient or an amiable woman; and she had endured
+great and unmerited wrongs from Rachel's father. Perhaps, she would have
+been more than human, had she not occasionally reminded her step-daughter
+of Mr. Thomas Gray's misdeeds, and now and then taunted her with a "He
+never cared about you--you know."
+
+Aye--Rachel knew it well enough. She knew that her own father loved her
+not--that though he had cared little for Jane, not being a
+tender-hearted man, still that he had cared somewhat, for that younger,
+and more favoured child. That before he left England, he would
+occasionally caress her; that when she died, tears had flowed down his
+stern cheek on hearing the tidings, and that the words had escaped him:
+"I am sorry I was not there."
+
+All this Rachel knew. Her mind was too noble, and too firm for jealousy;
+her heart too pious, and too humble for rebellious sorrow; but yet she
+found it hard to bear, and very hard to be reminded of it as a reproach
+and a shame.
+
+Was it not enough that she could not win the affection she most longed
+for? She was devoted to her step-mother; she had fondly loved her younger
+sister; but earlier born in her heart than these two loves, deeper, and
+more solemn, was the love Rachel felt for her father. That instinct of
+nature, which in him was silent, in her spoke strongly. That share of
+love which he denied her, she silently added to her own, and united both
+in one fervent offering. Harshness and indifference had no power to
+quench a feeling, to which love in kindness had not given birth. She
+loved because it was her destiny; because, as she once said herself, when
+speaking of another: "A daughter's heart clings to her father with
+boundless charity."
+
+Young as she was when Thomas Gray left his home, Rachel remembered him
+well. His looks, the very tones of his voice, were present to her. Not
+once, during the years of his absence, did the thought of her father
+cease to haunt her heart. When, from the bitter remarks of her
+step-mother, she learned that he had returned, and where he had taken up
+his home, she had no peace until she succeeded in obtaining a glimpse of
+him. Free, as are all the children of the poor, she made her way to the
+street where he lived, and many a day walked for weary miles in order to
+pass by her father's door. But she never crossed the threshold, never
+spoke to him, never let him know who she was, until the sad day when she
+bore to him the news of her sister's death.
+
+He received her with his usual coldness--in such emotion as he showed,
+she had no share, like strangers they had met--like strangers they
+parted. But, though his coldness and her own timidity prevented nearer
+advances, they did not prevent Rachel from often seeking the remote
+neighbourhood and gloomy street where her father dwelt.
+
+It was a pleasure, though a sad one, to look on his face, even if she
+went not near him; and thus it happened, that on this dark night she
+stood in the sheltering obscurity of the well-known doorway, gazing on
+the solitary old man, yet venturing not to cross the narrow street.
+
+The wind blew from the east. It was cold and piercing; yet it could not
+draw Rachel from her vigil of love. Still she looked and lingered,
+wishing she knew not what; and hoping against hope. Thus she stayed,
+until Thomas Gray left his work, put up the shutters, then left the house
+by the private door, and slowly walked away to the nearest public-house.
+
+The shop was once more a blank in the dark street. Rachel looked at the
+deserted dwelling and sighed; than softly and silently she stole away.
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+
+It was late when Rachel reached home. She found her step-mother sitting
+up for her, rigid, amazed y indignant--so indignant, indeed, that though
+she rated Rachel soundly for her audacity in presuming to stay out so
+long without previous leave obtained, she quite forgot to inquire
+particularly why she had not come home earlier. A series of disasters had
+been occasioned by Rachel's absence; Jane and Mary had quarrelled, Mrs.
+Gray had been kept an hour waiting for her supper, the beer had naturally
+become flat and worthless, and whilst Mrs. Gray was sleeping--and how
+could she help sleeping, being quite faint and exhausted with her long
+vigil--puss had got up on the table and walked off with Rachel's polony.
+
+There was a touch of quiet humour in Rachel, and with a demure smile, she
+internally wondered why it was precisely her polony that had been
+selected by puss, but aloud she merely declared that she could make an
+excellent supper on bread and beer. Mrs. Gray, who held the reins of
+domestic management in their little household, assured her that she had
+better, for that nothing else was she going to get; she sat down
+heroically determined to eat the whole of her polony in order to punish
+and provoke her step-daughter; but somehow or other the half of that
+dainty had, before the end of the meal, found its way to the plate of
+Rachel, who, when she protested against this act of generosity, was
+imperiously ordered to hold her tongue, which order she did not dare to
+resist; for if Mrs. Gray's heart was mellow, her temper was sufficiently
+tart.
+
+The apprentices had long been gone to bed; as soon as supper was over,
+Mrs. Gray intimated to Rachel the propriety of following their example.
+Rachel ventured to demur meekly.
+
+"I cannot, mother--I have work to finish."
+
+"Then better have sat at home and finished it, than have gone gadding
+about, and nearly got a pitch plaster on your mouth," grumbled Mrs. Gray,
+who was a firm believer in pitch plasters, and abductions, and highway
+robberies, and all sorts of horrors. "Mind you don't set the house a
+fire," she added, retiring.
+
+"Why, mother," said Rachel, smiling, "you treat me like a child, and I am
+twenty-six."
+
+"What about that? when you aint got no more sense than a baby."
+
+Rachel did not venture to dispute, a proposition so distinctly stated.
+She remained up, and sat sewing until her work was finished; she then
+took out from some secret repository a small end of candle, lit it, and
+extinguished the long candle, by the light of which she had been working.
+From her pocket she took a small key; it opened a work-box, whence she
+drew a shirt collar finely stitched; she worked until her eyes ached, but
+she heeded it not, until they closed with involuntary fatigue and sleep,
+and still she would not obey the voice of wearied nature; still she
+stitched for love, like the poor shirtmaker for bread, until, without
+previous warning, her candle end suddenly flickered, then expired in its
+socket, and left her in darkness. Rachel gently opened the window, and
+partly unclosed the shutter; the moon was riding in the sky above the old
+house opposite, her pale clear light glided over its brown walls and the
+quiet street, down into the silent parlour of Rachel. She looked around
+her, moved at seeing familiar objects under an unusual aspect. In that
+old chair she had often seen her father sitting; on such a moonlight
+night as this she and Jane, then already declining, had sat by the
+window, and looking at that same sky, had talked with youthful fervour of
+high and eternal things. And now Jane knew the divine secrets she had
+guessed from afar, and Thomas Gray, alas! was a stranger and an alien in
+his own home.
+
+"Who knows," thought Rachel, "but he will return some day? Who knows--
+who can tell? Life is long, and hope is eternal. Ah! if he should come
+back, even though he never looked at me, never spoke, blessed, thrice
+blessed, should ever be held the day..." And a prayer, not framed in
+words, but in deep feelings, gushed like a pure spring from her inmost
+heart. But, indeed, when did she not pray? When was God divided from her
+thoughts? When did prayer fail to prompt the kind, gentle words that fell
+from her lips, or to lend its daily grace to a pure and blameless life?
+
+For to her, God was not what He, alas! is to so many--an unapproachable
+Deity, to be worshipped from afar, in fear and trembling, or a cold
+though sublime abstraction. No, Jesus was her friend, her counsellor, her
+refuge. There was familiarity and tenderness in her very love for Him;
+and, though she scarcely knew it herself, a deep and fervent sense of His
+divine humanity of those thirty-three years of earthly life, of toil, of
+poverty, of trouble, and of sorrow which move our very hearts within us,
+when we look from Bethlehem to Calvary, from the lowly birth in the
+Manger to the bitter death on the Cross.
+
+We might ask, were these the pages to raise such questions, why Jesus is
+not more loved thus--as a friend, and a dear one, rather than as a cold
+master to be served, not for love, but for wages. But let it rest.
+Sufficient is it for us to know that not thus did Rachel Gray love him,
+but with a love in which humility and tenderness equally blended.
+
+After a meditative pause, she quietly put away her things by moonlight,
+then again closed shutter and window, and softly stole up to the room
+which she shared with her step-mother. She soon fell asleep, and dreamed
+that she had gone to live with her father, who said to her, "Rachel!
+Rachel!" So great was her joy, that she awoke. She found her mother
+already up, and scolding her because she still slept.
+
+"Mother," asked Rachel, leaning up on one elbow, "was it you who called
+me, Rachel?"
+
+"Why aint I been a calling of you this last hour?" asked Mrs. Gray, with
+much asperity.
+
+Rachel checked a sigh, and rose.
+
+"Get up Jane--get up Mary," said Mrs. Gray, rapping soundly at the room
+door of the two apprentices.
+
+"Let them sleep a little longer, poor young things!" implored Rachel.
+
+"No, that I won't," replied her mother, with great determination, "lazy
+little creatures."
+
+And to the imminent danger of her own knuckles, she rapped so
+pertinaciously, that Jane and Mary were unable to feign deafness, and
+replied, the former acting as spokeswoman, that Mrs. Gray needn't be
+making all that noise; for that they heard her, and were getting up. "I
+thought I'd make them hear me," muttered Mrs. Gray, hobbling down stairs.
+
+There are some beings who lead lives so calm, that when they look back on
+years, they seem to read the story of a few days; and of these was Rachel
+Gray. Life for her flowed dull, monotonous and quiet, as that of a nun in
+her cloister. The story of one day was the story of the next. A few
+hopes, a few precious thoughts she treasured in her heart; but outwardly,
+to work, to hear idle gossip, to eat, drink, and sleep, seemed her whole
+portion, her destiny from mom till night, from birth to the grave.
+
+Like every day passed this day. When it grew so dark that she could see
+no more to work, she put her task by, and softly stole away to a little
+back room up-stairs.
+
+It was a very small room indeed, with a bed, where the apprentices slept;
+a chest of drawers, a table, and two chairs:--many a closet is larger.
+Its solitary window looked out on the little yard below; low walls,
+against which grew Rachel's stocks and wall-flowers, enclosed it. From
+the next house, there came the laughter and the screams too of children,
+and of babies; and from a neighbouring forge, a loud, yet not unmusical
+clanking, with which now and then, blended the rude voices of the men,
+singing snatches of popular songs. Dimmed by the smoke of the forge, and
+by the natural heaviness of a London atmosphere, the sky enclosed all;
+yet, even through the smoke and haze, fair rosy gleams of the setting sun
+shone in that London sky, and at the zenith there was a space of pure,
+ethereal blue--soft, and very far from sinful and suffering earth, where
+glittered in calm beauty a large and tranquil star.
+
+Rachel sat by the window. She listened to earth: she looked at Heaven.
+Her heart swelled with love, and prayer, and tenderness, and hope. Tears
+of delight filled her eyes; she murmured to herself verses from psalms
+and hymns--all praising God, all telling the beauty of God's creation.
+Oh! pure and beautiful, indeed, would be the story of these your evening
+musings, if we could lightly tell it here, Rachel Gray.
+
+Reader, if to learn how a fine nature found its way through darkness and
+mist, and some suffering to the highest, and to the noblest of the
+delights God has granted to man--the religious and the intellectual; if,
+we say, to learn this give you pleasure, you may read on to the end of
+the chapter; if not, pass on at once to the next. These pages were not
+written for you; and even though you should read them, feel and
+understand them, you never will.
+
+Our life is twofold; and of that double life, which, like all of us,
+Rachel bore within her, we have as yet said but little. She was now
+twenty six; a tall, thin, sallow woman, ungraceful, of shy manners, and
+but little speech; but with a gentle face, a broad forehead, and large
+brown eyes. By trade, she was a dress-maker, of small pretensions; her
+father had forsaken her early, and her step-mother had reared her. This
+much, knew the little world in which moved Rachel Gray, this much, and no
+more. We may add, that this some little world had, in its wisdom,
+pronounced Rachel Gray a fool.
+
+Her education had been very limited. She knew how to read, and she could
+write, but neither easily nor well. For though God had bestowed on her
+the rare dower of a fine mind, He had not added to it the much more
+common, though infinitely less precious gift, of a quick intellect. She
+learned slowly, with great difficulty, with sore pain and trouble. Her
+teachers, one and all, pronounced her dull; her step-mother was ashamed
+of her, and to her dying day thought Rachel no better than a simpleton.
+
+Rachel felt this keenly; but she had no means of self-defence. She had
+not the least idea of how she could prove that she was not an idiot. One
+of the characteristics of childhood and of youth is a painful inability,
+an entire powerlessness of giving the form of speech to its deepest and
+most fervent feelings. The infirmity generally dies off with years,
+perhaps because also dies off the very strength of those feelings; but
+even as they were to last for ever with Rachel Gray, so was that
+infirmity destined to endure. Shy, sensitive, and nervous, she was a
+noble book, sealed to all save God.
+
+At eleven, her education, such as it was, was over. Rachel had to work,
+and earn her bread. She was reared religiously, and hers was a deeply
+religious nature. The misapplication of religion narrows still more a
+narrow mind, but religion, taken in its true sense, enlarges a noble one.
+Yet, not without strife, not without suffering, did Rachel make her way.
+She was ignorant, and she was alone; how to ask advice she knew not, for
+she could not explain herself. Sometimes she seemed to see the most
+sublime truths, plain as in a book; at other times, they floated dark and
+clouded before her gaze, or vanished in deep obscurity, and left her
+alone and cast down. She suffered years, until, from her very sufferings,
+perfect faith was born, and from faith unbounded trust in God, after
+which her soul sank in deep and blessed peace.
+
+And now, when rest was won, there came the want for more. Religion is
+love. Rachel wanted thought, that child of the intellect, as love is the
+child of the heart. She did not know herself what it was that she needed,
+until she discovered and possessed it--until she could read a book, a
+pamphlet, a scrap of verse, and brood over it, like a bird over her
+young, not for hours, not for days, but for weeks--blest in that silent
+meditation. Her mind was tenacious, but slow; she read few books--many
+would have disturbed her. Sweeter and pleasanter was it to Rachel to
+think over what she did read, and to treasure it up in the chambers of
+her mind, than to fill those chambers with heaps of knowledge. Indeed for
+knowledge Rachel cared comparatively little. In such as displayed more
+clearly the glories of God's creation she delighted; but man's learning,
+man's science, touched her not. To think was her delight; a silent,
+solitary, forbidden pleasure, in which Rachel had to indulge by stealth.
+
+For all this time, and especially since the death of her sister, she
+suffered keenly from home troubles, from a little domestic persecution,
+painful, pertinacious, and irritating. Mrs. Gray vaguely felt that her
+daughter was not like other girls, and not knowing that she was in
+reality very far beyond most; feeling, too, that Rachel was wholly unlike
+herself, and jealously resenting the fact, she teased her unceasingly,
+and did her best to interrupt the fits of meditation, which she did not
+scruple to term "moping." When her mind was most haunted with some fine
+thought, Rachel had to talk to her step-mother, to listen to her, and to
+take care not to reply at random; if she failed in any of these
+obligations, half-an-hour's lecture was the least penalty she could
+expect. Dear to her, for this reason; were the few moments of solitude
+she could call her own; dear to her was that little room, where she could
+steal away at twilight time and think in peace.
+
+Very unlike her age was this ignorant dress-maker of the nineteenth
+century. Ask the men and women of the day to read volumes; why, there is
+not a season but they go through the Herculean labour of swallowing down
+histories written faster than time flies, novels by the dozen, essays,
+philosophic and political, books of travels, of science, of statistics,
+besides the nameless host of reviews, magazines, and papers, daily and
+weekly. Ask them to study: why, what is there they do not know, from the
+most futile accomplishment to the most abstruse science? Ask them too, if
+you like, to enter life, to view it under all its aspects; why, they have
+travelled over the whole earth; and life, they know from the palace down
+to the hovel; but bid them think! They stare aghast: it is the task of
+Sisyphus--the labour of the Danaide; as fast as thought enters their
+mind, it goes out again. Bid them commune, one day with God and their own
+hearts--they reply dejectedly that they cannot; for their intellect is
+quick and brilliant, but their heart is cold. And thought springs from
+the heart, and in her heart had Rachel Gray found it.
+
+The task impossible to them was to her easy and delightful. Time wore on;
+deeper and more exquisite grew what Rachel quaintly termed to herself
+"the pleasure of thinking." And oh! she thought sometimes, and it was a
+thought that made her heart bum, "Oh! that people only knew the pleasures
+of thinking! Oh! if people would only think!" And mom, and noon, and
+night, and bending over her work, or sitting at peaceful twilight time in
+the little back room, Rachel thought; and thus she went on through life,
+between those two fair sisters, Thought and Prayer.
+
+Reader, hare you known many thinkers? We confess that we hare known many
+men and women of keen and great intellect, some geniuses; but only one
+real thinker have we known, only one who really thought for thought's own
+sake, and that one was Rachel Gray.
+
+And now, if she moves through this story, thinking much and doing little,
+you know why.
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+
+It was not merely in meditation that Rachel indulged, when she sought the
+little room. The divine did not banish the human from her heart; and she
+had friends known to her, but from that back room window; but friends
+they were, and, in their way and degree, valued ones.
+
+First, came the neighbour's children. By standing up on an old wooden
+stool in the yard, they could see Rachel at her window, and Rachel could
+see them. They were rude and ignorant little things enough, and no better
+than young heathens, in rearing and knowledge; yet they liked to hear
+Rachel singing hymns in a low voice; they even caught from her, scraps of
+verses, and sang them in their own fashion; and when Rachel, hearing
+this, took courage to open a conversation with them, and to teach them as
+well as she could, she found in them voluntary and sufficiently docile
+pupils. Their intercourse, indeed, was brief, and limited to a few
+minutes every evening that Rachel could steal up to her little room, but
+it was cordial and free.
+
+Another friend had Rachel, yet one with whom she had never exchanged
+speech. There existed, at the back of Mrs. Gray's house, a narrow court,
+inhabited by the poorest of the poor. Over part of this court, Mrs.
+Gray's back windows commanded a prospect which few would have envied--
+yet it had proved to Rachel the source of the truest and the keenest
+pleasure.
+
+From her window, Rachel could look clearly into a low damp cellar
+opposite, the abode of a little old Frenchwoman, known in the
+neighbourhood, as "mad Madame Rose."
+
+Madame Rose, as she called herself, was a very diminutive old woman--
+unusually so, but small and neat in all her limbs, and brisk in all her
+movements. She was dry, too, and brown as a nut, with a restless black
+eye, and a voluble tongue, which she exercised mostly in her native
+language--not that Madame Rose could not speak English; she had resided
+some fifteen years in London, and could say 'yes' and 'no,' &c., quite
+fluently. Her attire looked peculiar, in this country, but it suited her
+person excellently well; it was simply that of a French peasant woman,
+with high peaked cap, and kerchief, both snow-white, short petticoats,
+and full, a wide apron, clattering wooden shoes, and blue stockings.
+
+What wind of fortune had wafted this little French fairy to a London
+cellar, no one ever knew. How she lived, was almost as great a mystery.
+Every Sunday morning, she went forth, with a little wooden stool, and
+planted herself at the door of the French chapel; she asked for nothing,
+but took what she got. Indeed, her business there did not seem to be to
+get anything, but to make herself busy. She nodded to every one who went
+in or out, gave unasked-for information, and assisted the policeman in
+keeping the carriages in order. She darted in and out, among wheels and
+horses, with reckless audacity; and once, to the infinite wrath of a fat
+liveried coachman, she suspended herself--she was rather short--from
+the aristocratic reins he held, and boldly attempted to turn the heads of
+his horses. On week days, Madame Rose stayed in her cellar, and knitted.
+It was this part of her life which Rachel knew, and it was the most
+beautiful; for this little, laughed-at being, who lived upon charity,
+was, herself, all charity. Never yet, for five years that Rachel had
+watched her, had she seen Madame Rose alone in her cellar. Poor girls,
+who looked very much like out-casts, old and infirm women, helpless
+children, had successively shared the home, the bed, and the board of
+Madame Rose. For her seemed written the beautiful record, "I was naked,
+and ye clothed me; I was hungry, and ye fed me: athirst, and ye gave me
+drink; and I was houseless, and you sheltered me."
+
+With humble admiration, Rachel saw a charity and a zeal which she could
+not imitate. Like Mary, she could sit at the feet of the Lord, and,
+looking up, listen, rapt and absorbed, to the divine teaching. But the
+spirit of Martha, the holy zeal and fervour with which she bade welcome
+to her heavenly guest, were not among the gifts of Rachel Gray.
+
+Yet, the pleasure with which she stood in the corner of her own window,
+and looked down into the cellar of Madame Rose, was not merely that of
+religious sympathy or admiration. As she saw it this evening, with the
+tallow light that burned on the table, rendering every object minutely
+distinct, Rachel looked with another feeling than that of mere curiosity.
+She looked with the artistic pleasure we feel, when we gaze at some
+clearly-painted Dutch picture, with its back-ground of soft gloom, and
+its homely details of domestic life, relieved by touches of brilliant
+light. Poor as this cellar was, a painter would have liked it well; he
+would surely have delighted in the brown and crazy clothes-press, that
+stood at the further end, massive and dark; in the shining kitchen
+utensils that decorated the walls; in the low and many-coloured bed; in
+the clean, white deal table; in the smouldering fire, that burned in that
+dark grate, like a red eye; especially would he have gloried in the
+quaint little figure of Madame Rose.
+
+She had been cooking her supper, and she now sat down to it. In doing so,
+she caught sight of Rachel's figure; they were acquainted--that is to
+say, that Madame Rose, partly aware of the interest Rachel took in such
+glimpses as she obtained of her own daily life, favoured her with tokens
+of recognition, whenever she caught sight of her, far or near. She now
+nodded in friendly style, laughed, nodded again, and with that
+communicativeness which formed part of her character, successively
+displayed every article of her supper for Rachel's inspection. First,
+came a dishful of dark liquid--onion soup it was--then, a piece of
+bread, not a large one; then, two apples; then a small bit of cheese--
+for Madame Rose was a Frenchwoman, and she would have her soup, and her
+dish, and her dessert, no matter on what scale, or in what quantity.
+
+But the supper of Madame Rose did not alone attract the attention and
+interest of Rachel. For a week, Madame Rose had enjoyed her cellar to
+herself; her last guest, an old and infirm woman, having died of old age;
+but, since the preceding day, she had taken in a new tenant--an idiot
+girl, of some fourteen years of age, whom her father, an inhabitant of
+the court, had lately forsaken, and whom society, that negligent
+step-mother of man, had left to her fate.
+
+And now, with tears of emotion and admiration, Rachel watched the little
+Frenchwoman feeding her adopted child; having first girt its neck with a
+sort of bib, Madame Rose armed herself with a long handled spoon, and
+standing before it--she was too short to sit--she deliberately poured a
+sufficient quantity of onion soup down its throat a proceeding which the
+idiot girl received with great equanimity, opening and shutting her mouth
+with exemplary regularity and seriousness.
+
+So absorbed was Rachel in looking, that she never heard her mother
+calling her from below, until the summons was, for a third time, angrily
+repeated.
+
+"Now, Rachel, what are you doing up there?" asked the sharp voice of Mrs.
+Gray, at the foot of the staircase; "moping, as usual! Eh?"
+
+Rachel started, and hastened down stairs, a little frightened. She had
+remained unusually long. What if her mother should suspect that she had
+gone up for the purpose of thinking? Mrs. Gray had no such suspicion,
+fortunately; else she would surely have been horror-struck at the
+monstrous idea, that Rachel should actually dare to think! The very
+extravagance of the supposition saved Rachel It was not to be thought of.
+
+The candle was lit. Mrs. Brown and another neighbour had looked in.
+Gossip, flavoured with scandal--else it would have been tasteless--was
+at full galop.
+
+"La! but didn't I always say so?" exclaimed Mrs. Brown, who had always
+said everything.
+
+"I couldn't have believed it, that I couldn't!" emphatically observed
+Mrs. Gray.
+
+"La, bless you, Mrs. Gray! _I_ could," sneered the neighbour, who was
+sharp, thin, and irritable.
+
+Even Jane had her word:
+
+"I never liked her," she said, giving her thread a pull.
+
+"Who is she?" languidly asked Mary, letting her work fall on her knees.
+
+"Never you mind, Miss," tartly replied Jane. "Just stitch on, will you?"
+
+Mrs. Brown was again down on the unlucky absent one.
+
+"Serve her right," she said, benevolently. "Serve her right--the set up
+thing! Oh! there's Rachel. Lawk, Rachel! what a pity you ain't been here!
+You never heard such a story as has come out about that little staymaker,
+Humpy, as I call her. Why, she's been a making love to--la! but I can't
+help laughing, when I think of it; and it's all true, every word of it;
+aint it, Mrs. Smith?"
+
+Mrs. Smith loftily acquiesced.
+
+"Oh! my little room--my little room!" inwardly sighed Rachel, as she sat
+down to her work. She hoped that the story was, at least, finished and
+over; but if it was, the commentaries upon it were only beginning, and
+Heaven knows if they were not various and abundant.
+
+Rachel did her best to abstract herself; to hear, and not listen. She
+succeeded so well that she only awoke from her dream when Mrs. Brown said
+to her,
+
+"Well, Rachel, why don't you answer, then?"
+
+Rachel looked up, with a start, and said, in some trepidation,
+
+"Answer! I didn't hear you speak, ma'am."
+
+"Didn't you now!" knowingly observed Mrs. Brown, winking on the rest of
+the company.
+
+"No, ma'am, I did not, indeed," replied Rachel, earnestly.
+
+"Bless the girl!" said Mrs. Brown, laughing outright; "why, you must be
+growing deaf."
+
+"I hope not," said Rachel, rather perplexed; "yet, perhaps, I am; for,
+indeed, I did not hear you."
+
+"La, Miss Gray! don't you see they are making fun of you?" impatiently
+observed Jane. "Why, Mrs. Brown hadn't been a saying anything at all."
+
+Rachel reddened a little, and there was a general laugh at her expense.
+The joke was certainly a witty one. But Mrs. Gray, who was a touchy
+woman, was not pleased; and no sooner were her amiable visitors gone,
+than she gave it to Rachel for having been laughed at with insolent
+rudeness.
+
+"If you were not sich a simpleton," she said, in great anger, "people
+wouldn't dare to laugh at you. They wouldn't take the liberty. No one
+ever laughed at me, I can tell you. No Mrs. Brown; no, nor no Mrs. Smith
+either. But you! why, they'll do anythink to you."
+
+Rachel looked up from her work into her mother's face. It rose to her
+lips to say--"If you were not the first to make little of me, would
+others dare to do so?" but she remembered her lonely forsaken childhood,
+and bending once more over her task, Rachel held her peace.
+
+"I want to go to bed," peevishly said Mary.
+
+"Then go, my dear," gently replied Rachel.
+
+"You'll spoil that girl," observed Mrs. Gray, with great asperity.
+
+"She is not strong," answered Rachel; "and I promised Mr. Jones she
+should not work too much."
+
+"Not much fear of that," drily said Jane, as the door closed on Mary.
+
+No one answered. Rachel worked; her mother read the paper, and for an
+hour there was deep silence in the parlour. As the church clock struck
+nine, a knock came at the door. Jane opened, and a rosy, good-humoured
+looking man entered the parlour. He was about forty, short, stout, with
+rather a low forehead, and stubby hair; altogether, he seemed more
+remarkable for good-nature than for intelligence. At once his look went
+round the room.
+
+"Mary is gone to bed, Mr. Jones," said Rachel, smiling.
+
+"To bed!--She ain't ill, I hope. Miss Gray," he exclaimed, with an
+alarmed start.
+
+"Ill! Oh, no! but she felt tired. I am sorry you have had this long walk
+for nothing."
+
+"Never mind, Miss Gray," he replied cheerfully; then sitting down, and
+wiping his moist brow, he added--"the walk does me good, and then I hear
+how she is, and I've the pleasure of seeing you all. And so she's quite
+well, is she?"
+
+He leaned his two hands on the head of his walking-stick, and looking
+over it, smiled abstractedly at his own thoughts. Mrs. Gray roused him
+with the query--
+
+"And what do you think of the state of the nation, Mr. Jones?"
+
+Mr. Jones scratched his head, looked puzzled, hemmed, and at length came
+out with the candid confession:
+
+"Mrs. Gray, I ain't no politician. For all I see, politics only brings a
+poor man into trouble. Look at the Chartists, and the tenth of April."
+
+"Ah! poor things!" sighed Rachel, "I saw them--they passed by here. How
+thin they were--bow careworn they looked!"
+
+Mrs. Gray remained aghast. Rachel had actually had the audacity to give
+an opinion on any subject unconnected with dress-making--and even on
+that, poor girl! she was not always allowed to speak.
+
+"Now, Rachel," she said, rallying, "_will_ you hold _your_ tongue, and
+speak of what you know, and not meddle with politics."
+
+We must apologize for using italics, but without their aid we never could
+convey to our readers a proper idea of the awful solemnity with which
+Mrs. Gray emphasized her address. Rachel was rather bewildered, for she
+was not conscious of having said a word on politics, a subject she did
+not understand, and never spoke on; but she had long learned the virtue
+of silence. She did not reply.
+
+"As to the Chartists?" resumed Mrs. Gray, turning to Mr. Jones.
+
+"Law bless you, Mrs. Gray, _I_ ain't one of them!" he hastily replied. "I
+mind my own business--that's what I do, Mrs. Gray. The world must go
+round, you know."
+
+"So it must," gravely replied that lady. "You never said a truer thing,
+Mr. Jones."
+
+And very likely Mr. Jones had not.
+
+"And I must go off," said Mr. Jones, rising with a half-stifled sigh,
+"for it's getting late, and I have five miles to walk."
+
+And, undetained by Mrs. Gray's slow but honest entreaty to stay and share
+their supper, he left Rachel lighted him out. As she closed the parlour
+door, he looked at her, and lowering his voice, he said hesitatingly:
+
+"I couldn't see her, could I, Miss Gray?"
+
+Poor Rachel hesitated. She knew that she should get scolded if she
+complied; but then, he looked at her with such beseeching eyes--he
+wished for it so very much. Kindness prevailed over fear; she smiled, and
+treading softly, led the way up-stairs. As softly, he followed her up
+into the little back room.
+
+Mary was fast asleep; her hands were folded over the coverlet of
+variegated patchwork; her head lay slightly turned on the white pillow;
+the frill of her cap softly shaded her pale young face, now slightly
+flushed with sleep. Her father bent over her with fond love, keeping in
+his breath. Rachel held the light; she turned her head away, that Mr.
+Jones might not see her eyes, fest filling with tears. "Oh! my father--
+my father!" she thought, "never have you looked so at your child--never
+--never!"
+
+On tip-toe, Mr. Jones softly withdrew, and stole downstairs.
+
+"I'd have kissed her," he whispered to Rachel, as she opened the door for
+him, "but it might have woke her out of that sweet sleep."
+
+And away he went, happy to have purchased, by a ten miles walk after a
+day's hard labour, that look at his sleeping child.
+
+"Oh, Lord! how beautiful is the love Thou hast put into the hearts of Thy
+creature!" thought Rachel Gray; and though it had not been her lot to win
+that love, the thought was to her so sweet and so lovely, that she bore
+without repining her expected scolding.
+
+"Mrs. Gray had never heard of such a think--never."
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+
+The rich man has his intellect, and its pleasures; he has his books, his
+studies, his club, his lectures, his excursions; he has foreign lands,
+splendid cities, galleries, museums, ancient and modern art: the poor man
+has his child, solitary delight of his hard tasked life, only solace of
+his cheerless home.
+
+Richard Jones had but that one child, that peevish, sickly, fretful
+little daughter; but she was his all. He was twenty-one, when the grocer
+in whose shop his youth had been spent, died a bankrupt, leaving one
+child, a daughter, a pale, sickly young creature of seventeen, called
+Mary Smith.
+
+Richard Jones had veneration large. He had always felt for this young
+lady an awful degree of respect, quite sufficient of itself to preclude
+love, had he been one to know this beautiful feeling by more than hearsay
+--which he was not. Indeed, he never could or would have thought of Mary
+Smith as something less than a goddess, if, calling at the house of the
+relative to whom she had gone, and finding her in tears, and, on her own
+confession, very miserable, he had not felt moved to offer himself, most
+hesitatingly, poor fellow I for her acceptance.
+
+Miss Smith gave gracious consent. They were married, and lived most
+happily together. Poor little Mary's temper was none of the best; but
+Richard made every allowance: "Breaking down of the business--other's
+death--having to marry a poor fellow like him, &c." In short, he proved
+the most humble and devoted of husbands, toiled like a slave to keep his
+wife like a lady, and never forgot the honour she had conferred upon him;
+to this honour Mrs. Jones added, after three years, by presenting him
+with a sickly baby, which, to its mother's name of Mary, proudly added
+that of its maternal grandfather Smith.
+
+A year after the birth of Mary Smith Jones, her mother died. The
+affections of the widower centred on his child; he had, indeed, felt more
+awe than fondness for his deceased wife--love had never entered his
+heart; he earned it with him, pure and virgin, to the grave, impressed
+with but one image--that of his daughter.
+
+He reared his little baby alone and unaided. Once, indeed, a female
+friend insisted on relieving him from the charge; but, after surrendering
+his treasure to her, after spending a sleepless night, he rose with dawn,
+and went and fetched back his darling. During his wife's lifetime, he had
+been employed in a large warehouse; but now, in order to stay at home, he
+turned basket-maker. His child slept with him, cradled in his arms; he
+washed, combed, dressed it himself every morning, and made a woman of
+himself for its sake.
+
+When Mary grew up, her father sent her to school, and resumed his more
+profitable out-door occupation. After a long search and much
+deliberation, he prenticed her to Rachel Gray, and with her Mary Jones
+had now been about a month.
+
+"How pretty she looked, with that bit of pink on her cheek," soliloquized
+Richard Jones, as he turned round the corner of the street on his way
+homewards; and fairer than his mistress's image to the lover's fancy,
+young Mary's face rose before her father on the gloom of the dark night.
+A woman's voice suddenly broke on his reverie. She asked him to direct
+her to the nearest grocer's shop.
+
+"I am a stranger to the neighbourhood," he replied; "but I dare say this
+young person can tell us;" and he stopped a servant-girl, and put the
+question to her.
+
+"A grocer's shop?" she said, "there's not one within a mile. You must go
+down the next street on your right-hand, turn into the alley on your
+left, then turn to your right again, and if you take the fifth street
+after that, it will take you to the Teapot."
+
+She had to repeat her directions twice before the woman fairly understood
+them.
+
+"What a chance!" thought Jones, as he again walked on; "not a grocer's
+shop within a mile. Now, suppose I had, say fifty pounds, just to open
+with, how soon the thing would do for itself. And then I'd have my little
+Mary at home with me. Yes, that would be something!"
+
+Ay; the shop and Mary!--ambition and love! Ever since he had dealt tea
+and sugar in Mr. Smith's establishment, Richard Jones had been haunted
+with the desire to become a tradesman, and do the same thing in a shop of
+his own. But, conscious of the extravagant futility of this wish, Jones
+generally consoled himself with the thought that grocer's shops were as
+thick as mushrooms, and that, capital or no capital, there was no room
+for him.
+
+And now, as he walked home, dreaming, he could not but sigh, for there
+was room, he could not doubt it--but where was the capital? He was still
+vaguely wondering in his own mind, by what magical process the said
+capital could possibly be called up, when he reached his own home. There
+he found that, in his absence, a rudely scrawled scrap of paper had been
+slipped under his room door; it was to the following purport:
+
+
+"Dear J.,
+
+"Als up; farm broke. Weral inn for it.
+
+"Yours,
+
+"S. S."
+
+
+This laconic epistle signified that the firm in whose warehouse Richard
+Jones was employed, had stopped payment Rich men lost their thousands,
+and eat none the worse a dinner; Richard Jones lost his week's wages, his
+future employment, and remained stunned with the magnitude of the blow.
+
+His first thought flew to his child.
+
+"How shall I pay Miss Gray for my little Mary's keep?" he exclaimed,
+inwardly.
+
+He cast his look round the room to see what he could pledge or sell.
+Alas! there was little enough there. His next feeling was,
+
+"My darling must know nothing about it Thank God, she is not with me now!
+Thank God!"
+
+But, though this was some sort of comfort, the future still looked so
+dark and threatening, that Jones spent a sleepless night, tossing in his
+bed, and groaning so loudly, that his landlady forsook her couch to knock
+at his door, and inquire, to his infinite confusion, "if Mr. Jones felt
+poorly, and if there was anything she could do for him, and if he would
+like some hot ginger?" To which Mr. Jones replied, with thanks, "that he
+was quite well, much obliged to her all the same."
+
+After this significant hint, he managed to keep quiet. Towards morning,
+he fell asleep, and dreamed he had found a purse full of guineas, and
+that he was going to open a grocer's shop, to be called the Teapot.
+
+Richard Jones was sober, intelligent enough for what he had to do, and
+not too intelligent--which is a great disadvantage; he bore an excellent
+character; and yet, somehow or other, when he searched for employment,
+there seemed to be no zoom for him; and had he been a philosopher, which,
+most fortunately for his peace of mind, he was not, he must inevitably
+hare come to the conclusion, that in this world he was not wanted.
+
+We are not called upon to enter into the history of his struggles. He
+maintained a sort of precarious existence, now working at this, now
+working at that; for he was a Jack of all trades, and could torn his hand
+to anything, but certain of no continual employment. How he went through
+it all, still paying Miss Gray, still keeping up a decent appearance,
+contracting no debts, the pitying eye which alone looks down on the
+bitter trials of the poor, also alone knows.
+
+The poorer a man gets, the more he thinks of wealth and money; the
+narrower does the world close around him, and all the wider grows the
+world of his charms. The shop, which had only been a dormant idea in
+Richard Jones's mind, now became a living phantom; day and night, mom and
+noon it haunted him. When he had nothing to do--and this was,
+unfortunately, too often the case--he sought intuitively the suburb
+where Rachel Gray dwelt; ascertained, over and over, that within the mile
+circuit of that central point there did not exist one grocer's shop, and
+finally determined that the precise spot where, for public benefit and
+its own advantage, a grocer's shop should be, was just round the corner
+of the street next to that of Rachel Gray, in a dirty little house, now
+occupied by a rag and bottle establishment, with very dirty windows, and
+a shabby black doll dangling like a thief, over the doorway; spite of
+which enticing prospect, the rag and bottle people seemed to thrive but
+indifferently, if one might judge from the sulky, ill-tempered looking
+woman, whom Jones always saw within, sorting old rags, and scowling at
+him whenever she caught him in the act of peering in.
+
+It was, therefore, with no surprise, though with some uneasiness, that
+coming one day to linger as usual near the place, James found the rag and
+bottle shop closed, the black doll gone, and the words, "To let"
+scrawled, in white chalk, on the shutters. Convinced that none but a
+grocer could take such a desirable shop, and desirous, at least, to know
+when this fated consummation was to take place, Jones took courage, and
+went on as far as Rachel Gray's.
+
+Jane, the grim apprentice, opened to him,
+
+"There's no one at home," she said.
+
+Mr. Jones pleaded fatigue, and asked to be permitted to rest awhile. She
+did not oppose his entrance, but grimly repelled all his attempts at
+opening a conversation. He entered on that most innocent topic, the
+weather, and praised it.
+
+"It has been raining," was Jane's emphatic reply.
+
+"Oh! has it? What's them bells ringing for, I wonder."
+
+"They aint a ringing; they're a tolling."
+
+Mr. Jones, rather confused at being thus put down by a girl of sixteen,
+coughed behind his hand, and looked round the room for a subject. He
+found none, save a general inquiry after the health of Mary, Mrs. Gray,
+and Miss Gray.
+
+"They're all well enough," disdainfully replied Jane.
+
+"Oh, are they! I see the rag and bottle shop is shut," he added, plunging
+desperately into the subject.
+
+"S'pose it is!" answered Jane, eyeing him rather defiantly; for the rag
+and bottle woman was her own aunt; and she thought the observation of a
+personal nature.
+
+Though much taken aback, Jones, spurred on by the irresistible wish to
+know, ventured on another question.
+
+"You don't know who is going to take it next, do you?"
+
+"Oh! you want to take it, do you?" said Jane.
+
+"I--I!" exclaimed Jones, flurried and disconcerted. "La, bless the young
+woman! I aint in the rag and bottle line, am I?"
+
+He thought by this artful turn to throw his young enemy off the scent;
+but her rejoinder showed him the futility of the attempt.
+
+"I didn't say you was, did I?" she replied, drily.
+
+Jones rose precipitately, and hastily desiring his love to Mrs. Gray, and
+his respects to Mary, he retreated most shamefully beaten. He did not
+breathe freely until he reached the end of the street, and once more
+found himself opposite the closed rag shop. How he had come there, he did
+not rightly know; for it was not his way home. But, being there, he
+naturally gave it another look. He stood gazing at it very attentively,
+and absorbed in thought, when he was roused by a sharp voice, which said,
+
+"P'raps you'd like to see it within."
+
+The voice came from above. Richard looked up. The first floor window was
+open, and a man's head was just thrust out of it. It looked down at him
+in the street, and apparently belonged to a little old man, to whom one
+very sharp eye--the other was closed up quite tight--and a long nose,
+which went all of one side, gave a rather remarkable appearance.
+
+"Thank you, sir," replied Jones, rather confused. "I--I--"
+
+Before he had got to the end of his speech, the old man vanished from the
+window, and suddenly appeared at the private door, beckoning him in.
+
+"Come in," he said, coaxingly, like an ogre luring in an unwary little
+boy.
+
+And, drawn as by a magnet, Jones entered.
+
+"Dark passage, but good shop," said the old man. He opened a door, and in
+the shop suddenly stepped Richard Jones. It was small, dirty, and smelt
+of grease and old rags.
+
+"Good shop," said the old man, rubbing his hands, in seeming great glee;
+"neat back parlour;" he opened a glass door, and Jones saw a triangular
+room, not much larger than a good-sized cupboard.
+
+"More rooms up stairs," briskly said the old man; he nimbly darted up an
+old wooden staircase, that creaked under him. Mechanically Jones
+followed. There were two rooms on the upper and only storey; one of
+moderate size; the other, a little larger than the back parlour.
+
+"Good shop," began the old man, reckoning on his fingers, "ca-pital shop;
+neat parlour--very neat; upper storey, two rooms; one splendid; cosy
+bed-room; rent of the whole, only thirty-five pounds a-year--only
+thirty-five pounds a-year!"
+
+The repetition was uttered impressively.
+
+"Thank you--much obliged to you," began Richard Jones, wishing himself
+fairly out of the place; "but you see--"
+
+"Stop a bit," eagerly interrupted the old man, catching Jones by the
+button-hole, and fixing him, as the 'Ancient Mariner' fixed the wedding
+guest, with his glittering eye, "stop a bit; you take the house, keep
+shop, parlour, and bedroom for yourself and family--plenty; furnish
+front room, let it at five shillings a week; fifty-two weeks in the year;
+five times two, ten--put down naught, carry one; five times five,
+twenty-five, and one, twenty-six--two hundred and sixty shillings, make
+thirteen pounds; take thirteen pounds from thirty-five--"
+
+"Law bless you, Sir!" hastily interrupted Jones, getting frightened at
+the practical landlord view the one-eyed and one-sided-nosed old man
+seemed to take of his presence in the house. "Law bless you, Sir! it's
+all a mistake, every bit of it."
+
+"A mistake!" interrupted the old man, his voice rising shrill and loud.
+"A mistake! five times two, ten--"
+
+"Well, but I couldn't think of such a thing," in his turn interrupted
+Jones. "I--"
+
+"Well then, say thirty pound," pertinaciously resumed the old man; "take
+thirteen from thirty--"
+
+"No, I can't then--really, I can't," desperately exclaimed Jones; "on my
+word I can't."
+
+"Well, then, say twenty-five; from twenty-five take thirteen--"
+
+"I tell you, 'tain't a bit of use your taking away thirteen at that
+rate," interrupted Jones, rather warmly.
+
+"And what will you give, then?" asked the old man, with a sort of
+screech.
+
+"Why, nothing!" impatiently replied Jones. "Who ever said I would give
+anything? I didn't--did I?"
+
+"Then what do you come creeping and crawling about the place for?" hissed
+the old man, his one eye glaring defiance on Jones, "eh! just tell me
+that. Why, these two months you've crept and crept, and crawled, and
+crawled, till you've sent the rag and bottle people away. 'Sir,' says the
+rag and bottle woman to me, 'Sir, we can't stand it no longer. There's a
+man, Sir, and he prowls around the shop. Sir, and he jist looks in, and
+darts off agin, and he won't buy no rags, and he hasn't no bottles to
+sell; and my husband and me, Sir, we can't stand it--that's all.' Well,
+and what have you got to say to that, I should like to know?"
+
+Jones, who never had a very ready tongue, and who was quite confounded at
+the accusation, remained dumb.
+
+"I'll tell you what you are, though," cried the old man, his voice rising
+still higher with his wrath; "you are a crawling, creeping, low, sneaking
+fellow!"
+
+"Now, old gentleman!" cried Jones, in his turn losing his temper, "just
+keep a civil tongue in your head, will you? I didn't ask to come in, did
+I? And if I did look at the shop at times, why, a cat can look at a king,
+can't he?"
+
+Spite of the excellence of the reasoning thus popularly expressed, Jones
+perceived that the old man was going to renew his offensive language, and
+as he wisely mistrusted his own somewhat hasty temper, he prudently
+walked downstairs, and let himself out. But then he reached the street,
+the old man's head was already out of the first-floor window, and Jones
+turned the corner pursued with the words "creeping," "crawling." He lost
+the rest.
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+
+Rachel sat alone, working and thinking. The dull street was silent; the
+sound and stir of morning, alive elsewhere, reached it not; but the sky
+was clear and blue, and on that azure field mounted the burning sun,
+gladdening the very house-roofs as he went, and filling with light and
+life the quiet parlour of Rachel Gray.
+
+Mrs. Gray was an ignorant woman, and she spoke bad English; but her
+literary tastes were superior to her education and to her language. Her
+few books were good--they were priceless; they included the poetical
+works of one John Milton. Whether Mrs. Gray understood him in all his
+beauty and sublimity, we know not, but at least, she read him, seriously,
+conscientiously--and many a fine lady cannot say as much. Rachel, too,
+read Milton, and loved him as a fine mind must ever love that noble poet.
+That very morning, she had been reading one of his sonnets, too little
+read, and too little known. We will give it here, for though, of course,
+all our readers are already acquainted with it, it might not be present
+to their memory.
+
+
+   "When I consider how my light is spent
+   Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
+   And that one talent which is death to hide,
+   Lodg'd with me useless, though my soul more bent,
+   To serve therewith my Maker, and present
+   My true account, lest he, returning, chide;
+   'Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?'
+   I fondly ask: but Patience to prevent
+   That murmur, soon replies, 'God doth not need
+   Either man's work, or his own gifts; who best
+   Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best; his state
+   Is kingly; thousands at his bidding speed,
+   And post o'er land and ocean without rest;
+   They also serve, who only stand and wait'"
+
+
+   "'They also serve who only stand and wait,'"
+
+
+thought Rachel, brooding over the words, as was her wont, "and that is my
+case. Oh, God! I stand and wait, and alas! I do nothing, for I am blind,
+and ignorant, and helpless, and what am I that the Lord should make use
+of me; yet, in His goodness, my simple readiness to do His will, He takes
+as good service. Oh, Rachel! happy Rachel! to serve so kind a master."
+
+Her work dropt on her lap; and so deep was her abstraction, that she
+heard not the door opening, and saw not Richard Jones, until he stood
+within a few paces of her chair. She gave a slight start on perceiving
+him; and her nervous emotion was not lessened, by remarking that he was
+rather pale and looked excited.
+
+"Mary is very well," she said, hastily, and half smiling at the supposed
+alarm which had, she thought, brought him so suddenly in upon her.
+
+"Of course she is--of course she is," he replied, nodding; then, drawing
+a chair near to Rachel's, he sat down upon it, and, bending forward, with
+his two hands resting on his knees, he said, in a deep, impressive
+whisper,
+
+"Miss Gray, may I speak to you? I want you to advise me," he added, after
+a slight pause.
+
+"To advise you, Mr. Jones!" echoed Rachel, looking up at him, with mild
+astonishment.
+
+"Yes, Miss Gray," he firmly replied; and, slightly clearing his throat,
+he thus began: "Miss Gray, I aint a known you very long; but there aint
+another in this wide world whom I respect as I do you. And I think I have
+proved it; for haven't I given you my little Mary? I couldn't do more,
+Miss Gray," he added, with energetic earnestness. "Yes, Miss Gray, I do
+respect you; and that is why I want you to advise me. Now, this is the
+whole story:--
+
+"From a boy, Miss Gray, I have wished to be in business. I was in
+business at Mr. Smith's, Mr. Smith was the grandfather of my little Mary,
+but not on my account; and that's not quite the same thing, you see. And
+I have wished to be in the grocery line, in particular, because of
+understanding it so much better, from having been brought up to it, like.
+Now, Miss Gray, here's the plain truth of the case. Some time ago, I
+found out, by chance, that there was not--actually, that there was not a
+grocer's shop in this immediate vicinity!" Here Mr. Jones held up his
+forefinger by way of note of admiration. "Well, Miss Gray," he resumed
+impressively, "that thought haunted me. Why here was the very place for
+me! A grocer was wanted. I found out, too, that the rag and bottle shop
+round the corner was just the place for me, and the people left, too; but
+bless you. Miss Gray, 't was all not a bit of use--for why--I hadn't
+got no capital! Well, Miss Gray, to make a long story short, a cousin of
+mine has just died, and left me all she had, poor thing, and that was
+sixty pound. Now, Miss Gray, what I want to know is this:--do you think
+that as a father--that is, the father of my little Mary--I'm justified
+in risking that money by setting up a shop, or that it's my duty to keep
+it all up for the child?"
+
+He looked earnestly in Rachel's face. Ay, the child; it was still the
+child, and always the child. His own was not his own--it was but a trust
+held for his little Mary.
+
+"Truly, Mr. Jones," said Rachel, smiling, "you can do what you like with
+your own."
+
+"No, indeed, Miss Gray," he rejoined, a little warmly, "I must think of
+my little Mary first; and you see the whole question is, which is best
+for her. Why, I aint slep these three nights with thinking on it, and so,
+at last, I thought I'd come to you."
+
+Who had ever asked Rachel for advice! Rachel the simpleton--Rachel the
+slighted and laughed-at dressmaker? Little did Mr. Jones know how nervous
+he made the poor girl; besides, she felt quite bewildered at the strange
+views he took of the case he submitted to her. At length she gathered
+courage, and looking earnestly in his face with her mild brown eyes, she
+spoke.
+
+"Mr. Jones," she said, "it seems to me that as the money is yours, and
+that as your intentions are to turn it to a good account, you have a
+right to do with it as you please. I think, too, that you are likely to
+do very well as a grocer, for we really do want one about here. But I
+only tell you what I think. I do not advise. I really cannot. If you want
+advice, Mr. Jones, why, ask it of one who cannot mistake, for He is not
+liable to human error--ask it of God Almighty."
+
+Richard Jones scratched his head, then hung it down ashamed. If he had
+dared, he would have asked of Rachel how he was to ask of God to advise
+him, and, especially, how he was to get the answer! Poor fellow! he had
+an excellent hearty some faith, much charity, but the world's net was
+around him. His life was not like that of Rachel Gray--a heaven upon
+earth. And Rachel, who laboured under the disadvantages of a narrow
+education, and a narrow life, who had not enough knowledge and enough
+experience of human nature to understand clearly that there were states
+of mind worlds lower than her own, did not suspect that she had given
+Richard Jones the worst of all advice--that which the receiver cannot
+follow.
+
+Alas! who talks of God now! who listens like Adam in Eden to the voice of
+the Lord, and treasures in his or her own heart that source of all
+knowledge? And we complain that God goes away from us; that His face is
+dark, and behind the cloud; that in the days of adversity we find him
+not.
+
+Jones rose confused, muttered thanks, then hastily changed the subject by
+asking to see his daughter. Even as he spoke, the door opened, and Mary
+entered.
+
+She did not show much pleasure or surprise on seeing her father; it was
+not that she did not love him, but she was a spoiled child, too much
+accustomed to his fondness and devotion to set great value on either. She
+complained of the heat, then of the cold, sat down, got up again, and
+gave herself all the airs of a precocious woman. Her father, leaning on
+his stick, looked at her with admixing fondness, and occasionally nodded
+and winked at Rachel, as if inviting her to admire likewise. At length,
+with a half stifled sigh--for he never parted from his darling without
+regret--he again said he must go.
+
+"And so, good-bye, my little Mary," he added, kissing her, but the
+peevish child half-turned her head away, and said his beard hurt her.
+"You hear her, Miss Gray," he exclaimed, chuckling, "does not care a pin
+for her old father, not a pin," and chucking Mary's chin, he looked down
+at her fondly.
+
+"Dear me, father, how can you?" asked the young lady, rather pettishly.
+Upon which, Mr. Jones shook his head, looked delighted, and at length
+managed to tear himself away.
+
+"And is it thus, indeed, that fathers love their daughters?" thought
+Rachel Gray, as she sat alone in the little back room on the evening of
+that day. "And is it thus, indeed! Oh! my father--my father!"
+
+She laid down the book she had been attempting to read. She leaned her
+brow upon her hand; she envied none, but her heart felt full to
+over-flowing. Since the night when she had gone to look at her father, as
+we have recorded, Rachel had not felt strong or courageous enough to
+attempt more. Her nature was timid, sensitive and shrinking to a fault,
+and circumstances had made it doubly so, yet the repeated sight of
+Richard Jones's devoted love for his child, inspired her with involuntary
+hope. She had grown up in the belief of her father's rooted indifference;
+might she not have been mistaken? was it not possible that his daughter
+could become dear to Thomas Gray, as other daughters were dear to their
+father? Rachel had always cherished the secret hope that it would one day
+be so, but because that hope was so precious, she had deferred risking
+it, lest it should perish irretrievably. She now felt inwardly urged to
+make the attempt. Why should she not, like the prodigal son, rise and go
+to her father? "I will," she thought, clasping her hands, her cheeks
+flushing, her eyes kindling, "yes, I will go to-morrow, and my father
+shall know his daughter; and, perhaps, who knows, perhaps God Almighty
+will bless me."
+
+Here the sound of a sudden tumult in the little court close by, broke on
+the dream of Rachel Gray. She looked, and she saw and heard Madame Rose
+gesticulating and scolding, to the infinite amusement of a crowd of boys,
+who where teazing the idiot girl. The wrath of Madame Rose was something
+to see. Having first placed her protege behind herself for safety--as
+if her own little body could do much for the protection of another twice
+its size--Madame Rose next put herself in an attitude, then expostulated
+with, then scolded, then denounced the persecutors of the helpless idiot;
+after which washing her hands of them, she walked backwards to her
+cellar, scorning to turn her back to the foe. But the enemy, nothing
+daunted, showed evident intentions of besieging her in her stronghold,
+and though Madame Rose made her appearance at the window, armed with a
+broomstick, she failed to strike that terror into the hearts of her
+assailants, which the formidable nature of the weapon warranted.
+Fortunately, however, for the peace of the little French lady, that
+valiant knight-errant of modern times, the policeman, having made his
+appearance at the entrance of the court, a scutter, then a rushing
+flight, were the immediate consequence. Ignorant of this fact, Madame
+Rose ascribed the result entirely to her own prowess, and in all peace of
+mind proceeded to cook her supper. Then followed the little domestic
+scenes which Rachel liked to watch.
+
+As Rachel looked, she took a bold resolve, and this was to pay Madame
+Rose a visit. They had met, the day before, in the street; and Madame
+Rose had addressed a long and voluble discourse to Rachel, in French,
+concluding with an invitation to visit her, which Rachel had understood,
+and smilingly accepted.
+
+And now was the favourable moment to carry this project into effect. From
+the little room, Rachel heard Mrs. Brown's loud voice below in the
+parlour. Mrs. Gray was fully engaged, and not likely to mind her
+daughter's absence. Unheeded, Rachel slipped out.
+
+A few minutes brought her round to the little courts and to the house
+inhabited by Madame Rose. It was dingy, noisy, and dirty; and as she
+groped and stumbled down the dark staircase, Rachel half repented haying
+come. The voice of Madame Rose directed her to the right door--for there
+were several. She knocked gently; a shrill "entrez," which she rightly
+interpreted as a summons to enter, was uttered from within; and pushing
+the door open, Rachel found herself in the abode and presence of Madame
+Rose.
+
+She was received with a storm of enthusiasm, that rather bewildered than
+pleased her. Madame Rose welcomed her in a torrent of speech, with a
+multiplicity of nods, and winks, and shrugs, and exclamations, so novel
+in the experience of Rachel Gray, that she began to wonder how much truth
+there might be in the epithet occasionally bestowed on Madame Rose. For,
+first of all, she insisted on cooking a dish of onion soup for her
+expressly, a kindness which Rachel had all the trouble in the world to
+resist; and next, this point settled, she was loud and unceasing in the
+praise of the poor idiot girl, who sat mowing in her chair.
+
+Rachel went and sat near her, and spoke to her, but she only got an
+unintelligible murmur for a reply. Madame Rose shook her head, as much as
+to say that the attainments of Mimi--so she called her--did not include
+speech. But Mimi was very good--very good indeed, only she could not
+talk, which was "bien dommage," added Madame Rose, as, had she only been
+able to speak, Mimi would certainly have done it charmingly.
+
+"You should see her eating onion soup," enthusiastically added Madame
+Rose. "It is beautiful!" Then, seeing that Rachel was engaged in
+scrutinizing, with a pitying glance, the ragged attire of her protege,
+Madame Rose jealously informed her that, as yet, the toilette of Mimi had
+been a little neglected, certainly; but that, "with time, and the help of
+God," added Madame Rose, "Mimi should want for nothing."
+
+"I have an old dress at home, that will just do for her," timidly said
+Rachel "Shall I bring it to-morrow night?"
+
+Madame Rose coughed dubiously--she had not understood; but a perfect
+knowledge of the English tongue, in all its most delicate intricacies,
+was one of her vanities. So, bending her head of one side, and patting
+her ear, as if to imply that there lay the fault, she evidently requested
+Rachel to repeat She did so; and this time, Madame Rose caught enough of
+her meaning to misunderstand her.
+
+"I understand--I understand!" she exclaimed, triumphantly; and settling
+Mimi in her chair, she told her to be good, for that she was only going
+to fetch her an elegant dress presented to her by the goodness of
+Mademoiselle, and that she would be back in an incredibly short space of
+time; after which exhortation, Madame Rose prepared to accompany Rachel.
+
+In vain, poor Rachel, alarmed at the prospect of her mother's anger,
+endeavoured to explain that she would bring the dress. Madame Rose, still
+triumphantly asserting that she understood, insisted on going out with
+her guest, and actually walked with her to her very door. In great
+trepidation, Rachel opened it, and unconscious of peril or offence,
+Madame Rose entered, clattering along the passage in her wooden shoes;
+but Mrs. Brown's voice was just then at the loudest; the noise was not
+heeded.
+
+Rachel took her up-stairs to the little back-room, and left her there,
+whilst she looked in the room which she shared with her mother, for the
+dress she wished to give Mimi; she soon came back with it, tied in a
+parcel, and now devoutly wished that she could see Madame Rose safe out
+of the place. But Madame Rose was in no mood to go. She had recognized
+the room and window where she so often saw Rachel; and she intimated as
+much, by a lively pantomime; first taking up a book, she held it before
+her, pretending to read; then she pointed to her forehead, to imply that
+Rachel was a thinker; and finally, to the horror and dismay of Rachel,
+Madame Rose shut her eyes, opened her mouth, and warbled a sufficiently
+correct imitation of the old hundredth.
+
+The window was open; and even Mrs. Brown's voice could not drown these
+strange tones. They reached the ear of Mrs. Gray; and before Rachel had
+fairly recovered from the surprise and alarm into which the musical
+outburst of Madame Rose had thrown her, her step-mother appeared at the
+door of the little back room, and, in stern and indignant accents, asked
+to know the meaning of what she heard and saw. But, before Rachel could
+reply, the French costume of Madame Rose had betrayed her.
+
+Mrs. Gray was of Scotch descent, and she had some of the old puritan
+spirit, to which, in the course of a long life, she had added a plenteous
+store of stubborn English prejudices.
+
+Madame Rose was "an idolatrous furriner!" "a French beggar!" too; and
+that she should have darkened her doors!--that she should be familiarly
+sitting under her roof--chattering and singing in a back room, with her
+daughter, was an intolerable insult, a wrong not to be borne.
+
+"I am amazed at you, Rachel!" she said, her voice quivering with
+indignation. "I am amazed at you. How dare you do sich a thing!"
+
+The tones and the attitude of Mrs. Gray were not to be misunderstood; nor
+was little Madame Rose so dull as to mistake them. She saw that her
+presence was not welcome, and, with great dignity, rose and took her
+leave. Crimson with pain and shame, Rachel followed her out. She gave
+Madame Rose an humble and imploring glance, as they parted at the door,
+as much, as to say, "You know I could not help it." But the appeal was
+not needed. To her surprise, Madame Rose remained very good-humoured. She
+even laughed and shrugged her shoulders, French fashion, and indulged in
+a variety of pantomimic signs, closing with one more intelligible than
+the rest: a significant tap of her forefinger on her brown forehead, and
+by which Madame Rose plainly intimated it to be her firm conviction that
+the intellect of Mrs. Gray was unfortunately deranged. Thus they parted.
+
+Violent were the reproaches with which Mrs. Gray greeted her daughter's
+reappearance. She exacted a strict and rigid account of the rise and
+progress of Rachel's acquaintance with that "mad French beggar;" was
+horror-struck on learning that the back-room window had been made the
+medium; and not satisfied with prohibiting future intercourse, took the
+most effective means to prevent it, by locking up the guilty zoom, and
+putting the key in her pocket.
+
+To all this Rachel submitted; though, when she saw the door of her
+much-loved retreat closing on her, her heart ached. But when, in the
+height of her anger, Mrs. Gray railed at the poor little Frenchwoman, as
+little better than an idolater or an infidel, Rachel felt as if it
+touched her honour, not to suffer this slur on her humble friend.
+
+"Mother," she said, with some firmness, "you cannot tell what she is; for
+you know nothing of her, save by idle reports. I have watched her life
+day after day, and I have seen that it is holy. And, mother," added
+Rachel, slightly colouring, from the fervour with which she felt and
+spoke, "you know it as I do: all holiness comes from God."
+
+Unable to contradict, Mrs. Gray sniffed indignantly.
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+
+Hard indeed were the days that followed for Rachel Gray. The old quarrel
+had began anew. Why was she not like every one? Why did she pick up
+strange acquaintances?--above all, why did she mope, and want to be in
+the little back room? It was strange, and Mrs. Gray was not sure that it
+was not wicked. If so, it was a wickedness of which she effectually
+deprived Rachel, by keeping the back room locked, and the key in her
+pocket.
+
+But, hard as this was, it was not all. Amongst Rachel's few treasures,
+were little pamphlets, tracts, old sermons, scraps of all sorts, a little
+hoard collected for years, but to their owner priceless. She did not read
+them daily; she had not time; but when she was alone, she took them oat,
+now and then, to look at and think over. On the day that followed the
+affair of Madame Rose, Mrs. Gray discovered Rachel's board.
+
+"More of Rachel's rubbish!" she thought, and she took the papers to the
+kitchen, and lit the fire with them forthwith.
+
+"Oh, mother! what have you done!" cried Rachel, when she discovered her
+loss.
+
+"Well, what about it?" tartly asked Mrs. Gray.
+
+A few silent, unheeded tears Rachel shed, but no more was said.
+
+But her very heart ached; and, perhaps, because it did ache, her longing
+to go and see her father returned all the stronger. The whole day, the
+thought kept her in a dream.
+
+"I never saw you so mopish," angrily exclaimed Mrs. Gray, "never!"
+
+Rachel looked up in her mother's face, and smiled so pleasantly, that
+Mrs. Gray was a little softened, she herself knew not why; but the smile
+was so very sweet.
+
+And again Rachel sat up that night, when all were sleeping in the little
+house; again she burned her precious candle ends, and sat and sewed, to
+finish the last of the half-dozen of fine linen shirts, begun a year
+before, purchased with the few shillings she could spare now and then
+from her earnings, and sewed by stealth, in hours robbed from the rest of
+the night, after the fatigue of the day. But, spite of all her efforts to
+keep awake, she fell asleep over her task. When she awoke, daylight
+gleamed through the chinks of the shutters; it was morning. She opened
+the window in some alarm; but felt relieved to perceive that it was early
+yet. The street was silent; every window was closed; the sky, still free
+from smoke was calm and pure; there was a peace in this stillness, which
+moved the very heart of Rachel Gray. She thought of the calm slumbers of
+the two millions, who, in a few hours, would fill the vast city, with
+noise, agitation and strife; and she half sadly wondered that for the few
+years man has to spend here below, for the few wants and cravings he
+derives from nature, he should think it needful to give away the most
+precious hours of a short life, and devote to ceaseless toil every
+aspiration and desire of his heart.
+
+It was too late to think of going to bed, which would, besides, have
+exposed her to discovery. So, after uniting her morning and evening
+prayers in one long and fervent petition of Hope and Love, she went back
+to her work, finished the little there was to do, then carefully folded
+up the six shirts, and tied them up in a neat parcel.
+
+When this was done, Rachel busied herself with her usual tasks about the
+house, until her mother came down. It was no uncommon thing for Rachel to
+get up early, and do the work, while her mother still slept; and,
+accordingly, that she should have done so, as Mrs. Gray thought, drew
+forth from her no comment on this particular morning.
+
+Everything, indeed, seemed to favour her project; for, in the course of
+the day, Mrs. Gray and Jane went out. Rachel remained alone with Mary.
+
+"Why, how merry you are to-day, Miss!" said Mary, looking with wonder at
+Rachel, as she busied herself about the house, singing by snatches.
+
+"It is such a fine day," replied Rachel; she opened the parlour window;
+in poured the joyous sunshine--the blue sky shone above the dull brick
+street, and the tailor's thrush began to sing in its osier cage. "A day
+to make one happy," continued Rachel; and she smiled at her own thoughts;
+for on such a beautiful day, how could she but prosper? "Mary," she
+resumed, after a pause, "you will not be afraid, if I go out, and leave
+you awhile alone, will you?"
+
+"La, bless you! no, Miss Gray," said Mary, smiling. "Are you afraid when
+you are alone?" she added, with a look of superiority; for she, too,
+seeing every one else around her do it, unconsciously began to patronize
+Rachel.
+
+"Oh, no!" simply replied Rachel Gray, too well disciplined into humility
+to feel offended with the pertness of a child, "I am never afraid; but
+then, I am so much older than you. However, since you do not mind it, I
+shall go out. Either Jane or my mother will soon be in, and so you will
+not long remain alone, at all events."
+
+"La, bless you! I don't mind," replied Mary, again looking superior.
+
+And now, Rachel is gone out. She has been walking an hour and more.
+Again, she goes through a populous neighbourhood, and through crowded
+streets; but this time, in the broad daylight of a lazy summer afternoon.
+Rachel is neither nervous nor afraid--not, at least, of anything around
+her. On she goes, her heart full of hope, her mind full of dreams. On she
+goes: street after street is passed; at length, is reached the street
+where Thomas Gray, the father of Rachel, lives.
+
+She stops at the second-hand ironmonger's and looks at the portraits and
+the books, and feels faint and hopeless, and almost wishes that her
+father may not be within.
+
+Thomas Gray was at his work, and there was a book by him at which he
+glanced now and then, Tom Paine's "Rights of Man." There was an empty
+pewter pot too, and a dirty public-house paper, from which we do not mean
+to have it inferred that Thomas Gray was given to intoxication. He was
+essentially a sober, steady man, vehement in nothing, not even in
+politics, though he was a thorough Republican.
+
+Thomas Gray was planing sturdily, enjoying the sunshine, which fell full
+on his meagre figure. It was hot; but as he grew old he grew chilly,
+when, suddenly, a dark shadow came between him and the light. He looked
+up, and saw a woman standing on the threshold of his shop. She was young
+and simply clad, tall and slender, not handsome, and very timid looking.
+
+"Walk in ma'am," he said, civilly enough.
+
+The stranger entered; he looked at her, and she looked at him.
+
+"Want anything?" he asked, at length.
+
+She took courage and spoke.
+
+"My name is Rachel," she said.
+
+He said nothing.
+
+"Rachel Gray," she resumed.
+
+He looked at her steadily, but he was still silent.
+
+"I am your daughter," she continued, in faltering accents.
+
+"Well! I never said you was not;" he answered rather drily. "Come, you
+need not shake so; there's a chair there. Take it and at down."
+
+Rachel obeyed; but she was so agitated that she could not utter one word.
+Her father looked at her for awhile, then resumed his work. Rachel did
+not speak--she literally could not. Words would have choked her; so it
+was Thomas Gray who opened the conversation.
+
+"Well, and how's the old lady?" he asked.
+
+"My mother is quite well, thank you. Sir," replied Rachel The name of
+father was too strange to be used thus at first.
+
+"And you--how do you get on? You 're a milliner, stay-maker--ain't
+you?"
+
+"I am a dress-maker; but I can do other work," said Rachel, thinking
+this, poor girl! a favourable opening for her present.
+
+"I have made these for you," she added, opening and untying her parcel;
+and displaying the shirts to her father's view, and as she did so, she
+gazed very wistfully in his face.
+
+He gave them a careless look.
+
+"Why, my good girl," he said, "I have dozens of shirts--dozens!"
+
+And he returned to his work, a moment interrupted.
+
+Tears stood in Rachel's eyes.
+
+"I am sorry," she began, "but--but I did not know; and then I thought--
+I thought you might like them."
+
+"'Taint of much consequence," he philosophically replied, "thank you all
+the same. Jim," he added, hailing a lad who was passing by, "just tell
+them at the 'Rose' to send down a pint of half-and-half, will you? I dare
+say you'll have something before you go," he continued, addressing his
+daughter. "If you'll just look in there," he added, jerking his head
+towards the back parlour, "you'll find some bread and cheese on the
+table, there's a plate too."
+
+Rachel rose and eagerly availed herself of this invitation, cold though
+it was; she felt curious too, to inspect, her father's domestic
+arrangements. She was almost disappointed to find everything so much more
+tidy than she could have imagined. She had hoped that her services as
+house-keeper might be more required, either then, or at some future
+period of time. She sat down, but she could not eat.
+
+"Here's the half-and-half," said her father from the shop.
+
+Rachel went and took it; she poured out some in a glass, but she could
+not drink; her heart was too full.
+
+"You'd better," said her father, who had now joined her.
+
+"I cannot," replied Rachel, feeling ready to cry, "I am neither hungry
+nor thirsty, thank you."
+
+"Oh! aint you?" said her father, "yet you have a long walk home, you
+know."
+
+It was the second time he said so. Rachel looked up into his face; she
+sought for something there, not for love, not for fondness, but for the
+shadow of kindness, for that which might one day become affection--she
+saw nothing but cold, hard, rooted indifference. The head of Rachel sank
+on her bosom, "The will of God be done," she thought. With a sigh she
+rose, and looked up in her father's face.
+
+"Good bye, father," she said, for her father she would call him once at
+least.
+
+"Good bye, Rachel," he replied.
+
+She held out her hand; he took it with the same hard indifference he had
+shown from the beginning. He did not seek to detain her; he did not ask
+her to come again. His farewell was as cold as had been his greeting.
+Rachel left him with a heart full to bursting. She had not gone ten steps
+when he called her. She hastened back; he stood on the threshold of his
+shop, a newspaper in his hand.
+
+"Just take that paper, and leave it at the 'Rose,' will you? You can't
+miss the 'Rose'--it's the public-house round the left-hand corner."
+
+"Yes, father," meekly said Rachel. She took the paper from his hand,
+turned away, and did as she was bid.
+
+Her errand fulfilled, Rachel walked home. There were no tears on her
+cheek, but there was a dull pain at her heart; an aching sorrow that
+dwelt there, and that--do what she would--would not depart. In vain she
+said to herself--"It was just what I expected; of course, I could not
+think it would come all in a day. Besides, if it be the will of God, must
+I not submit?" still disappointment murmured: "Oh! but it is hard! not
+one word, not one look, not one wish to see me again; nothing--nothing."
+
+It was late when Rachel reached home. Mrs. Gray, confounded at her
+step-daughter's audacity in thus again absenting herself without leave,
+had, during the whole day, amassed a store of resentment, which now burst
+forth on Rachel's head. The irritable old lady scolded herself into a
+violent passion. Rachel received her reproaches with more of apathy than
+of her usual resignation. They were alone; Jane and Mary had retired to
+their room. Rachel sat by the table where the supper things were laid,
+her head supported by her hand. At the other end of the table sat Mrs.
+Gray erect, sharp, bitter; scolding and railing by turns, and between
+both burned a yellow tallow candle unsnuffed, dreary looking, and but
+half lighting the gloomy little parlour.
+
+"And so you won't say where you have been, you good-for-nothing
+creature," at length cried Mrs. Gray, exasperated by her daughter's long
+silence.
+
+Rachel looked up in her step-mother's face.
+
+"You did not ask me where I had been," she said deliberately. "I have
+been to see my father."
+
+Not one word could Mrs. Gray utter. The face of Rachel, pale, desolate,
+and sorrow-stricken, told the whole story. Rachel added nothing. She, lit
+another candle, and merely saying, in her gentle voice--
+
+"Good night, mother," she left the room.
+
+As Rachel passed by the little room of the apprentices, she saw a streak
+of light gliding out on the landing, through the half-open door. She
+pushed it, and entered. Jane sat reading by the little table; Mary lay in
+bed, but awake.
+
+"I did not know you were up," said Rachel to Jane, "and seeing a light, I
+felt afraid of fire."
+
+"Not much fear of fire," drily answered Jane. Rachel did not heed her--
+she was bending over Mary.
+
+"How are you to-night, Mary?" she asked.
+
+"Oh! I am quite well," pettishly answered Mary.
+
+Rachel smoothed the young girl's hair away from her cheek. She remembered
+how dearly, how fondly loved was that peevish child; and she may be
+forgiven if she involuntarily thought the contrast between that love, and
+her own portion of indifference, bitter.
+
+"Mary," she softly whispered, "did you say your prayers to-night?"
+
+"Why, of course I did."
+
+"And, Mary, did you pray for your father?"
+
+"I wish you would let me sleep," crossly said the young girl.
+
+"Oh! Mary--Mary!" exclaimed Rachel, and there was tenderness and pathos
+in her voice; "Mary, I hope you love your father--I hope you love him."
+
+"Who said I didn't?"
+
+"Ah! but I fear you do not love him as much as he loves you."
+
+"To be sure I don't," replied Mary, who had grown up in the firm
+conviction that children were domestic idols, of which fathers were the
+born worshippers.
+
+"But you must try--but you must try," very earnestly said Rachel.
+"Promise me that you will try, Mary."
+
+She spoke in a soft, low voice; but Mary, wearied with the discourse,
+turned her head away.
+
+"I can't talk, my back aches," she said peevishly.
+
+"Mary's back always aches when she don't want to speak," ironically
+observed Jane.
+
+"You mind your own business, will you!" cried Mary, reddening, and
+speaking very fast. "I don't want your opinion, at all events; and if I
+did--"
+
+"I thought you couldn't talk, your back ached so," quietly put in Jane.
+
+Mary burst into peevish tears. Jane laughed triumphantly. Rachel looked
+at them both with mild reproach.
+
+"Jane," she said, "it is wrong--very wrong--to provoke another. Mary,
+God did not give us tears--and they are a great gift of his mercy--to
+shed them so for a trifle. Do it no more."
+
+The two girls remained abashed. Rachel quietly left the room. She went to
+her own. She had prayed long that morning, but still longer did she pray
+that night. For alas!--who knows it not--the wings of Hope would of
+themselves raise us to Heaven; but hard it is for poor resignation to
+look up from this sad earth.
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+
+We were made to endure. A Heathen philosopher held the eight of the just
+man's suffering, worthy of the Gods, and Christianity knows nothing more
+beautiful, more holy, than the calm resignation of the pure and the
+lowly, to the will of their Divine Father.
+
+It was the will of Heaven that Rachel should not be beloved of her
+earthly father. She bore her lot--not without sorrow; but, at least,
+without repining. Perhaps, she was more silent, more thoughtful, than
+before; but she was not less cheerful, and in one sense she was certainly
+not less happy. Affliction patiently borne for the love of the hand that
+inflicts it, loses half its sting. The cup is always bitter--and doubly
+bitter shall it seem to us, if we drink it reluctantly; but if we
+courageously dram it, we shall find that the last drop is not like the
+rest It is fraught with a Divine sweetness--it is a precious balsam, and
+can heal the deepest and most envenomed wound.
+
+This pure drop Rachel found in her cup. It strengthened and upheld her
+through her trial. "It is the will of God," she repeated to herself--"It
+is the will of God;" and those simple words, which held a meaning so
+deep, were to Rachel fortitude and consolation.
+
+And in the meanwhile, the little world around her, unconscious of her
+sufferings and her trials--for even her mother could not wholly divine
+them--went on its ways. Mrs. Gray grumbled, Jane was grim, Mary was
+peevish, and Mrs. Brown occasionally dropped in "to keep them going," as
+she said herself.
+
+As to Richard Jones, we will not attempt to describe the uneasiness of
+mind he endured in endeavouring to follow out Rachel's advice. He did not
+understand its spirit, which, indeed, she could not have explained. They
+who make the will of God their daily law, are guided, even in apparently
+worldly matters,--not indeed, so as never to commit mistakes, which were
+being beyond humanity, but so, at least, as to err as little as possible
+concerning their true motives of action. Our passions are our curse,
+spiritual and temporal; and the mere habit of subduing them gives
+prudence and humility in all things:--wisdom thus becomes one of the
+rewards which God grants to the faithful servant.
+
+But of this, what did Richard Jones--the most unspiritual of good men,
+know? After three days spent in a state of distracting doubt, he came to
+the conclusion that it was, and must be the will of Heaven that he should
+have a shop. Poor fellow! if he took his own will for that of the
+Almighty, did he fall into a very uncommon mistake?
+
+Once, his mind was made up, he turned desperate, went and secured the
+shop. He had all the time been in a perfect fever, lest some other should
+forestall him, after which he became calm. "Did not much care about Miss
+Gray's opinion--did not see why he should care about any one's opinion,"
+and in this lofty mood it was that Richard Jones went and gave a loud,
+clear, and distinct knock at Mrs. Gray's door.
+
+Dinner was over--the apprentices were working--Rachel was dreaming,
+rather sadly, poor girl! for she thought of what was, and of what might
+have been. Mrs. Gray was reading the newspaper, when the entrance of
+Richard Jones, admitted by his daughter, disturbed the quiet little
+household. At once Mrs. Gray flew into politics.
+
+"Well, Mr. Jones," she cried, "and how are you? I suppose you know they
+are raising the taxes--and then such rates as we have, Mr. Jones--such
+rates!"
+
+Mrs. Gray was habitually a Tory, and not a mild one; but on the subject
+of taxes and rates, Mrs. Gray was, we are sorry to say, a violent
+radical. "She couldn't abide them," she declared.
+
+"And so they axe raising the taxes, are they!" echoed Mr. Jones,
+chuckling. "Eh! but that won't do for me, Mrs. Gray. I'm turning
+householder--and hard by here too!" he added, winking.
+
+Mrs. Gray did not understand at all. She coughed, and looked puzzled. Mr.
+Jones saw that Rachel had not spoken to her. He continued winking,
+chuckling, and rubbing his hands as he spoke.
+
+"I am going into business, Mrs. Gray."
+
+Mrs. Gray was profoundly astonished; Mary's work dropped on her lap as
+she stared with open mouth and eyes at her father, who chucked her chin
+for her.
+
+"Yes," he resumed, addressing Mrs. Gray; "I had always a turn that way."
+
+"Oh, you had!"
+
+"Always, Mrs. Gray; but I hadn't got no capital; and for a man to go into
+business without capital, why, ma'am, it's like a body that aint got no
+soul."
+
+"Don't talk so, Mr. Jones," said Mrs. Gray, to whom the latter
+proposition sounded atheistical, "don't!"
+
+"Well, but what's a man without capital?" asked Mr. Jones, unconscious of
+his offence, "why, nothink, Mrs. Gray, nothink! Well, but that's not the
+question--I've got capital now, you see, and so I am going to set up a
+grocery business in the rag and bottle shop round the corner; and I hare
+called to secure your custom--that's all, Mrs. Gray."
+
+He winked and chuckled again. Rachel could not help smiling. Mrs. Gray
+was grave and courteous, like any foreign potentate congratulating his
+dear brother, Monsieur mon frere, on some fortunate event of his reign.
+
+"I called to tell you that, Mrs. Gray," resumed Jones; "and, also, to ask
+a favour of Miss Gray. I should be so much obliged to 'her, if she could
+spare my little Mary for half an hour or so, just to look over the house
+with me."
+
+"Of course she can," replied Mrs. Gray for her meek daughter. "Go and put
+on your bonnet, Mary.'"
+
+Mary, whom the tidings of the grocer's shop had most agreeably excited,
+rose with great alacrity to obey, and promptly returned, with her bonnet
+on.
+
+It was Rachel who let them out.
+
+"You need not be in a hurry to come back, dear," she whispered; "there's
+not more work than Jane and I can well manage."
+
+Mary's only reply to this kind speech, was a saucy toss of the head. The
+little thing already felt an heiress.
+
+"How much money have you got, father?" she promptly asked, as they went
+down the street,
+
+"Sixty pounds, my dear."
+
+"Law! that ain't much," said Mary, as if she had rolled in guineas all
+her life.
+
+"Well, it isn't," he replied candidly, and exactly in the same spirit;
+for if there is a thing people promptly get used to, it is money.
+
+Mary had always been her father's confidante; he now opened his whole
+heart to her, and was thereby much relieved. To his great satisfaction,
+Mary condescended to approve almost without restriction, all he had done.
+She accompanied him over the house and shop--thought "the whole concern
+rather dirty," but kindly added, "that when it was cleaned up a bit, it
+would do;" and finally gave it as her opinion, "that there wasn't a
+better position in the whole neighbourhood."
+
+"Of course there ain't," said Mr. Jones, sitting down on the counter.
+"The goodwives must either buy from me, or walk a mile. Now it stands to
+reason that, rather than walk a mile, with babies crying at home, and
+husbands growling--it stands to reason, I say, that they'll buy from me.
+Don't it, Mary?"
+
+"Of course it does."
+
+"Well, that ain't all. You see I know something of business. The interest
+of capital in business ranges from ten to a hundred per cent according to
+luck; now I am lucky being alone, so we'll say fifty per cent, which is
+moderate, ain't it, Mary?"
+
+"Of course it is," replied that infallible authority.
+
+"Well then: capital, sixty pounds; interest, fifty per cent. Why, in no
+time, like, I shall double my capital; and when it's doubled, I shall
+double it again--and so I'll go on doubling and doubling until I'm tired
+--and then we'll stop. Won't we, Mary?"
+
+The little thing laughed; her father gave her a kiss; got up from the
+counter, and with the golden vision of endless doubling of capital before
+him, walked out of the shop.
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+
+What airs little Mary took; how Jane taunted and twitted her, how Rachel
+had to interfere; how even Mrs. Brown chose to comment on the startling
+fact of a new grocer's shop, and what predictions she made, we leave to
+the imagination of the reader.
+
+We deal with the great day, or rather with the eve of the great day. It
+was come. Rachel, her mother, Mary, and Mr. Jones were all busy giving
+the shop its last finishing touch; on the next morning the Teapot was to
+open.
+
+"Well, Miss Gray, 'tain't amiss, is it?" said Jones, looking around him
+with innocent satisfaction.
+
+He was, as we have said before, a sort of Jack-of-all-trades, and to him
+the Teapot doubly owed its existence. He had painted the walls; he had
+fixed up the shelves in their places; the drawers and boxes his own hands
+had fashioned. We will not aver that a professional glazier and carpenter
+might not have done all this infinitely better than Richard Jones, but
+who could have worked so cheap or pleased Richard Jones so well? And thus
+with harmless pleasure he could look around him and repeat:
+
+"Well, Miss Gray, 'tain't amiss, is it?"
+
+"Amiss!" put in Mrs. Gray, before her daughter could speak, "I should
+think not. You're a clever man, Mr. Jones, to have done all that with
+your own hands, out of your own head."
+
+Mr. Jones rubbed his forehead, and passed his hand through his stubby
+hair.
+
+"Well, Ma'am, 'tain't amiss, though I say it that shouldn't, and though
+'tain't much."
+
+"Not much, father!" zealously cried Mary, not relishing so much modesty,
+"why, didn't you nail them shelves with your own hands?"
+
+"Well, child," candidly replied her father, "I think I may say I did."
+
+"And didn't you make all them square boxes, a whole dozen of them?"
+
+"Hold your tongue you little chit, and help Miss Gray there to put up the
+jams and marmalades."
+
+"And didn't you paint the walls?" triumphantly exclaimed Mary, without
+heeding his orders.
+
+"Who else did, I should like to know?"
+
+"And the counter! who made the counter?"
+
+"Not I, Mary. I only polished it up."
+
+"Well, but what was it before you polished it up, father?" asked the
+pertinacious daughter.
+
+"Not much to speak of; that's the truth. Why, bless you, Mrs. Gray," he
+added, turning confidentially towards her, "you never saw such a poor
+object as that counter was in all your born days. It caught my eye at the
+corner of one of them second-hand shops in the New Cut. The man was
+standing at the door, whistling, with his hands in his pockets. 'That's
+fire-wood,' says I to him. 'No 'tain't, it's as good a counter as ever a
+sovereign was changed on.' 'My good man,' says I, 'it's firewood, and
+I'll give you five shillings for it.' Law, but you should have seen how
+he looked at me. Well, to cut a long story short, he swore it was a
+counter, and I swore it was firewood, and so, at length, I give him ten
+shillings for it, and brought it home and cleaned it down, and scraped
+the dirt, inch thick, off, and washed it, and painted it, and polished
+it, and look at it now, Mrs. Gray, look at it now!"
+
+"It's just like mahogany!" enthusiastically cried Mary, "ain't it. Miss
+Gray?"
+
+"Not quite, dear," mildly said Rachel, who was truth itself, "but it
+looks very nice. But, Mr. Jones," she added, in a low timid voice, "why
+did you tell the man it was firewood, when you meant it as a counter?"
+
+Jones wagged his head, winked, and touching his nose with his right hand
+forefinger, he whispered knowingly: "That was business, Miss Gray, and in
+business, you know--hem!"
+
+"But the Teapot, father," cried Mary, "where's the Teapot?"
+
+"Why, here's the Tea-pot," exclaimed Jones, suddenly producing this
+masterpiece of art, and holding it up aloft to the gaze of the beholders.
+
+Such a Teapot had never been seen before, and, most probably, will never
+be seen again, to the end of time. Its shape we will not, because we
+cannot describe. It confounded Rachel, and startled even Mrs. Gray. She
+coughed, and looked at it dubiously.
+
+"Where's the lid?" she said.
+
+"Why, here's the lid; but it don't take off, you know."
+
+"Oh! I see. And that's the handle."
+
+"The handle! bless you, Mrs. Gray, it's the spout."
+
+"Well, but where's the handle, then?"
+
+"Why, here's the handle, to be sure," replied Jones, rather nettled,
+"don't you see?"
+
+Mrs. Gray said she did; but we are inclined to believe she did not.
+However, Jones was satisfied; and, setting down the wooden Teapot--we
+forgot to say that it was flaming red--on the counter, he surveyed it
+complacently.
+
+"I spent a week on that Teapot," he said "didn't I, Mary?"
+
+"Ten days, father."
+
+"Well, one must not grudge time or trouble, must one, Mrs. Gray? And now,
+ladies, we'll put away the Teapot, and step into the parlour, and have a
+cup of tea, eh?"
+
+With the cup of tea, came a discussion of the morrow's prospects, and of
+the ultimate destinies of the Teapot--the upshot of which was, that Mr.
+Jones was an enterprising public man, and destined to effect a salutary
+revolution in the whole neighbourhood. Such, at least, was the opinion of
+Mrs. Gray, warmly supported by Mary. Mr. Jones was silent, through
+modesty; Rachel, because she was already thinking of other things. They
+parted late, though the Teapot was to open early.
+
+There is a report that it opened with dawn, Mr. Jones not having been
+able to shut his eyes all night for excitement. But it is more important
+to record that, until its close, late on the following evening, the
+Teapot was not one moment empty. Mary had remained at home, to assist her
+father; and she went through the day with perfect composure; but Mr.
+Jones was fairly overpowered: the cup of his honours was too full; the
+sum of his joy was too great. He blundered, he stammered, he was excited,
+and looked foolish. Altogether, he did not feel happy, until the shop was
+shut, and all was fairly over. He then sat down, wiped his forehead, and
+declared, that since he was married to his dear little Mary's blessed
+mother, he had never gone through such a trying day--never.
+
+"It's a fine thing Mr. Jones has undertaken," gravely observed Mrs. Gray
+to Mrs. Brown.
+
+But Mrs. Brown was inclined to look at the shady side of the Tea-pot.
+
+"La bless you!" she kindly said, "it'll never do. I said so from the
+first, and I say so the last, it'll never do!"
+
+"Oh, yes it will!" grimly observed Jane; "it will do for Mr. Jones, Mrs.
+Brown."
+
+"I hope not, Jane," said Rachel, gravely; "and I would rather," she
+added, with some firmness, and venturing for once on a reproof, "I would
+rather you did not think so much of what evil may happen to others.
+Sufficient to any of us is it to look forward to our own share of evil
+days."
+
+She raised her voice as she began; but it sank low ere she concluded.
+Surprised at herself for having said so much, she did not look round, but
+resumed her work, a moment interrupted. The room remained deeply silent
+Jane was crimson. For once, Mrs. Gray thought her daughter had spoken
+sensibly; and for once, Mrs. Brown found nothing to say.
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+
+A week had passed over the Teapot, and, sitting in the back-parlour with
+Mary, who was busy sewing, Richard Jones dived deep into his books, and
+cast up his accounts. He allowed for rent, for expenditure, for
+household, for extras, then his face, brimful of ill-disguised
+exultation, he said to his daughter: "Well, Mary, dear, 'taint much to
+boast of, but for a first week, you see, 'taint amiss, either. I find,
+all expenses covered, one pound ten net profit. Now, you know, that
+makes, first, fifty-two pound a-year; then half of fifty-two, twenty-six;
+add twenty-six to fifty-two, seventy-eight--seventy-eight pound a-year,
+net-profit. Well, it stands to reason and common sense, that as I go on,
+my business will go on improving too; in short, put it at the lowest--I
+hate exaggeration--well put it at the lowest, and I may say that by next
+Michaelmas, we shall have a neat hundred."
+
+"Law! father, can't you say a hundred and fifty at once," peevishly
+interrupted Mary.
+
+Mary's will was law.
+
+"Well, I really think I can say a hundred and fifty," ingenuously replied
+Richard Jones, "now, with a hundred and fifty pound for the first year,
+and just five per cent, as increase of profit for the second."
+
+"I'm sure it'll be ten per cent," again interrupted Mary, who, from
+hearing her father, had caught up some of the money terms of this
+money-making world.
+
+"Well, I should not wonder if it would not," replied her docile papa.
+"We'll suppose it, at least; well that'd be fifteen pound to add to the
+hundred and fifty, or, rather, to the three hundred, and then for the
+next year it would be--let me see! Ah!" and he scratched his head. "I
+think I am getting into what they call compound interest, and, to say the
+truth, I never was a very quick arithmetician. At all events, it is
+pretty clear that at the end of ten years, we shall stand at the head of
+something like fifteen hundred pound, and a flourishing house of
+business," he added, glancing towards the shop--"a flourishing house of
+business," he continued, complacently passing his Angers through his
+hair.
+
+Awhile he mused, then suddenly he observed: "Mary, my dear, hadn't you
+better go to bed?" Mary now slept at home. "You have to get up early, you
+know."
+
+"Yes; but I ain't going to," she tartly replied. "It gives me a pain in
+my side," she added.
+
+"Then you shall not get up early," authoritatively said Mr. Jones. "I'll
+not allow my daughter to work herself to death for no Miss Grays."
+
+"I don't think I shall go at all to-morrow," composedly resumed Mary. "I
+don't like dress-making--it don't agree with me."
+
+Mr. Jones had at first looked startled, but this settled the question.
+
+"If dress-making don't agree with you, not another stitch shall you put
+in," he said, half angrily. "I think myself you don't look half so well
+as you used to, and though Miss Gray is as nice a person as one need wish
+to meet, I think she might have perceived it before this; but interest
+blinds us all--every one of us," he added, with a philosophic sigh over
+the weaknesses of humanity.
+
+"I know what Jane will be sure to say," observed Mary; "but I don't
+care."
+
+"I should think not! Law! bless you, child, I have got quite beyond
+troubling my poor brains with what other people thinks; and if I choose
+to keep my daughter at home now that I can afford to do so, why shouldn't
+I? It's a hard case, if, when a man's well off and comfortable, and
+getting on better and better every day--it's a hard case, indeed, if he
+can't keep his only child with him."
+
+This matter decided, Mary went up to her room; her father remained by the
+fireside, looking at the glowing coals, and dreaming to his heart's
+content.
+
+"If I go on prospering so," he thought, "why should I not take--in time,
+of course--some smart young fellow to help me in the shop? It stands to
+reason that customers like to be served quickly. Law, bless you! they
+hate waiting," he added, thoughtfully, addressing the fire, and giving it
+a poke, by way of comment, "the ladies always hate it. But, as I was
+saying, why shouldn't I take some smart young man, and he, of course--
+why, I know what he'd do--why, he'd fall in love with Mary, of course--
+and why shouldn't he?" inquired Jones, warming with his subject "Was I
+not a poor fellow once, and did I not marry my master's daughter?"
+
+Mr. Jones gave the fire another poke. In the burning coals he saw a
+pleasing vision rise. He saw his shop full of customers; he served with
+slow dignity, assisted by a "tight, brisk young fellow," busy as a bee,
+active as a deer, for it was Saturday night, and the fair maids and
+matrons of the vicinity were all impatient. Then from Saturday it was
+Sunday; the shop was closed, the street was silent. Young Thomson was
+brushing his coat in the yard and whistling; Mary was upstairs dressing;
+another five minutes, and she comes down in straw bonnet lined with pink,
+clean printed muslin frock, mousseline-de-laine shawl, brown boots and
+blue parasol. The happy father saw them going off together with delighted
+eyes and brimful heart Then other visions follow; one of a wedding
+breakfast at which Mr. Jones sings a song, and another of half a dozen
+grandchildren, all tugging at his skirts, whilst he solemnly rocks the
+baby, and as solemnly informs the infant: "that he had done as much for
+its mother once."
+
+Peace be with such dreams whenever they come to the poor man's hearth!
+
+A little surprised at not seeing Mary as usual on the following morning,
+and thinking she might be unwell, Rachel Gray sent Jane to enquire. Jane
+soon returned, her face brimful of news.
+
+"Well," said Rachel, "how is Mary?"
+
+"Law bless you Miss, Mary's well enough."
+
+"Why did she not come then?"
+
+"She does not like dress-making no more."
+
+And Jane sat down, and took up her work, and became deeply absorbed in a
+sleeve trimming. Rachel reddened and looked pained. She liked Mary; the
+pale, sickly child reminded her strongly of her own lost sister, and
+though she could allow for the natural tartness with which Jane had no
+doubt fulfilled her errand, yet she knew that Jane was true, and that as
+she represented it, the matter must be.
+
+For a while she suspended her work, sadly wondering at the causeless
+ingratitude of a child whom she had treated with uniform kindness and
+indulgence, then she tried to dismiss the matter from her mind; but she
+could not do so, and when dusk came round, her first act, as soon as she
+laid by her work, was to slip out unperceived--for Mrs. Gray, highly
+indignant with Mr. Jones and his daughter, would certainly have opposed
+her--and go as far as the Teapot.
+
+Mr. Jones was serving a customer. He did not recognize Rachel as she
+entered the shop, and hastily called out:
+
+"Mary--Mary come and serve the lady."
+
+"It's only me, Mr. Jones," timidly said Rachel.
+
+"Walk in, Miss Gray," he replied, slightly embarrassed, "walk in, you'll
+find Mary in the back parlour, very glad to see you, Miss Gray."
+
+Much more sulky than glad looked Mary, but of this Rachel took no notice;
+she sat down by the side of the young girl, and, as if nothing had
+occurred, spoke of the Teapot and its prospects. To which discourse Mary
+gave replies pertinaciously sullen.
+
+"Mary!" at length said Rachel, "why did you not come to work to day, were
+you unwell?"
+
+This simple question obtaining no reply, Rachel repeated it; still Mary
+remained silent, but when a third time Rachel gently said: "Mary what was
+it ailed you?"
+
+Mary began to cry.
+
+"Well, well, what's the matter?" exclaimed her father looking in, "you
+ain't been scolding my little Mary have you. Miss Gray?"
+
+"I!" said Rachel, "no, Mr. Jones, I only asked her why she did not come
+this morning?"
+
+"Because I would not let her," he replied, almost sharply, "dress-making
+don't agree with my Mary, Miss Gray, and you know I told you from the
+first, that if her health wouldn't allow it, she was not to stay."
+
+And a customer calling him back to the shop, he left the parlour
+threshold. Rachel rose.
+
+"Good-night, Mary," she gently said; "if you feel stronger, and more able
+to work, you may come back to me."
+
+Mary did not reply.
+
+"Good-night, Mr. Jones," said Rachel, passing through the shop.
+
+"Good-night, Miss Gray," he replied, formally. "My best respects to Mrs.
+Gray, if you please."
+
+When people have done an insolent and ungrateful thing, they generally
+try to persuade themselves that it was a spirited, independent sort of
+thing; and so now endeavoured to think Richard Jones and his daughter--
+but in vain. To both still came the thought: "Was this the return to make
+to Rachel Gray for all her kindness?"
+
+The conscience of Mr. Jones, little used to such reflections, made him
+feel extremely uneasy; and if that of Mary was not quite so sensitive,
+the dull routine of the paternal home added much force to the conclusion
+"that she had much better have stayed with Miss Gray." Mary was too
+childish, and had ever been too much indulged to care for consistency. At
+the close of a week, she therefore declared that she wished to go back to
+Miss Gray, and did not know why her father had taken her away.
+
+"I--I--my dear!" said Richard Jones, confounded at the accusation, "you
+said getting up early made your side ache."
+
+"So it did; but I could have got up late, and gone all the same, only you
+wouldn't let me; you kept me here to mind the shop. I hate the shop.
+Teapot and all!" added Mary, busting into tears.
+
+Jones hung down his head--then shook it
+
+"Oh! my little Mary--my little Mary!" he exclaimed, ruefully; and he
+felt as if he could hare cried himself, to see the strange perversity of
+this spoiled child, "who turned upon him," as he internally phrased it,
+and actually upbraided him with his over-indulgence.
+
+A wiser father would never have thus indulged a pettish daughter, and
+never have humbled himself as, to please his little Mary, Richard Jones
+now did. That same day, he went round to Rachel Gray's; he had hoped that
+she might be alone in the little parlour; but no, there sat, as if to
+increase his mortification, Mrs. Gray, stiff and stern, and Jane smiling
+grimly. Rachel alone was the same as usual. Jones scratched his head,
+coughed, and looked foolish; but at length he came out with it:
+
+"Would Miss Gray take back his daughter, whose health a week's rest had
+much improved--much improved," he added, looking at Rachel doubtfully.
+
+Mrs. Gray drew herself up to utter a stern "No," but for once the mild
+Rachel checked and contradicted her mother, and said:
+
+"Yes, Mr. Jones, with great pleasure. You may send her to-day, if you
+like. She has missed us, and we have missed her."
+
+"Thank you, Miss Gray--thank you," said Jones, hurriedly rising to
+leave.
+
+"Give Mary my kind love," whispered Rachel, as she let him out.
+
+But Jones had not heard her. Very slowly, and with his hands in his
+pockets, he walked down the street. He had not grown tired of Mary's
+company; why had Mary grown tired of his? "It's natural, I suppose," he
+thought, "it's natural;" and when he entered the shop, where Mary sat
+sulking behind the counter, and he told her that she might go back to
+Miss Gray's, and when he saw her face light up with pleasure, he forgot
+that, though natural, it was not pleasant.
+
+"You may go to-day," he added, smiling.
+
+At once, Mary flew upstairs to her room. In less than five minutes, she
+was down again, and merely nodding to her father as she passed through
+the shop, off she went, with the light, happy step of youth.
+
+"It's natural," he thought again, "it's very natural," but he sighed.
+
+Mrs. Gray took in high dudgeon the consent her daughter had given to the
+return of Mary Jones. She scarcely looked at that young lady the whole
+day, and when she was gone, and Jane had retired to her little room, and
+mother and daughter sat together, Rachel got a lecture.
+
+"You have no spirit," indignantly said Mrs. Gray. "What! after the little
+hussy behaving so shamefully, you take her back for the asking!"
+
+"She is but a child," gently observed Rachel.
+
+"But her father ain't a child, is he?"
+
+Rachel smiled.
+
+"Indeed, mother, he is not much better," she replied.
+
+"I tell you, that you ain't got a bit of spirit," angrily resumed Mrs.
+Gray. "The little imperent hussy! to think of playing her tricks here!
+And do you think I'm agoing to stand that?" added Mrs. Gray, warming with
+her subject; "no, that I ain't! See if I don't turn her out of doors
+to-morrow morning."
+
+"Oh! mother, mother, do not!" cried Rachel, alarmed at the threat; "think
+that she is but a child, after all. And, oh, mother!" she added with a
+sigh, "have you never noticed how like she is to what our own little Jane
+once was?"
+
+Mrs. Gray remained mute. She looked back in the past for the image of her
+lost child. She saw a pale face, with blue eyes and fair hair, like
+Mary's. Never before had the resemblance struck her; when it came, it
+acted with overpowering force on a nature which, though rugged, and
+stern, and embittered by age and sorrows, was neither cold nor forgetful.
+
+One solitary love, but ardent and impassioned, had Sarah Gray known, in
+her life of three-score and ten--the love of a harsh, but devoted mother
+for an only child. For that child's sake had its father, whom she had
+married more for prudential reasons than for motives of affection, become
+dear to her heart. He was the father of her Jane. For that child's sake,
+had she, without repining, borne the burden of Rachel. Rachel was the
+sister of her Jane. Never should Rachel want, whilst she had heart and
+hands to work, and earn her a bit of bread.
+
+But when this much-loved child, after ripening to early youth, withered
+and dropped from the tree of life; when she was laid to sleep in a
+premature grave, all trace of the holy and beautiful tenderness which
+gives its grace to womanhood, seemed to pass away from the bereaved
+mother's heart. She became more harsh, more morose than she had ever
+been, and had it been worth the world's while to note or record it, of
+her too it might have been said, as it was of England's childless King,
+"that from one sad day she smiled no more." And now, when she heard
+Rachel, when in her mind she compared the living with the dead, strength,
+pride, fortitude forsook her, her stern features worked, her aged bosom
+heaved, passionate tears flowed down her wrinkled cheek.
+
+"Oh! my darling--my lost darling!" she cried, in broken accents, "would
+I could have died for thee! would thou wert here to-day! would my old
+bones filled thy young grave!"
+
+And she threw her apron over her face, and moaned with bitterness and
+anguish.
+
+"Mother, dear mother, do not, pray do not!" cried Rachel, distressed and
+alarmed at so unusual a burst of emotion. After a while, Mrs. Gray
+unveiled her face. It was pale and agitated; but her tears had ceased.
+For years they had not flowed, and until her dying day, they flowed no
+more.
+
+"Rachel," she said, looking in her step-daughter's face, "I forgive you.
+You have nearly broken my heart. Let Mary come, stay, and go; but talk to
+me no more of the dead. Rachel, when my darling died," here her pale lips
+quivered, "know that I rebelled against the Lord--know that I did not
+give her up willingly, but only after such agony of mind and heart as a
+mother goes through when she sees the child she has borne, reared,
+cherished, fondled, lying a pale, cold bit of earth before her! And,
+therefore, I say, talk no more to me about the dead, lest my rebellious
+heart should rise again, and cry out to its Maker: 'Oh God! oh God! why
+didst thou take her from me!'"
+
+Mrs. Gray rose to leave the room. On the threshold, she turned back to
+say in a low, sad voice:
+
+"The child may come to-morrow, Rachel."
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+
+Mrs. Gray had never cared about Mary Jones; she had always thought her
+what she was indeed--a sickly and peevish child. But now her heart
+yearned towards the young girl, she herself would have been loth to
+confess why. Mary took it as a matter of course, Jane wondered, Rachel
+well knew what had wrought such a change; but she said nothing, and
+watched silently.
+
+In softened tones, Mrs. Gray now addressed the young girl. If Rachel
+ventured to chide Mary, though ever so slightly, her step-mother sharply
+checked her. "Let the child alone," were her mildest words. As to Jane or
+Mrs. Brown, they both soon learned that Mary Jones was not to be looked
+at with impunity. Mrs. Gray wondered at them, she did, for teazing the
+poor little thing. In short, Mary was exalted to the post of favourite to
+the ruling powers, and she filled it with dignity and consequence.
+
+But the watchful eye of Rachel Gray noted other signs. She saw with
+silent uneasiness, the fading eye, the faltering step, the weakness daily
+increasing of her step-mother; and she felt with secret sorrow that she
+was soon to lose this harsh, yet not unloving or unloved companion of her
+quiet life.
+
+Mrs. Gray complained one day of feeling weak and ailing. She felt worse
+the next day, and still worse on the third. And thus, day by day, she
+slowly declined without hope of recovery. Mrs. Gray had a strong, though
+narrow mind, and a courageous heart. She heard the doctor's sentence
+calmly and firmly; and virtues which she had neglected in life, graced
+and adorned her last hours and her dying bed. Meek and patient she bore
+suffering and disease without repining or complaint, and granted herself
+but one indulgence: the sight and presence of Mary.
+
+The young girl was kinder and more attentive to her old friend than might
+have been expected from her pettish, indulged nature. She took a sort of
+pride in keeping Mrs. Gray company, in seeing to Mrs. Gray, as she called
+it Her little vanity was gratified in having the once redoubtable Mrs.
+Gray now wholly in her hands, and in some sort a helpless dependent on
+her good-will and kindness. It may be, too, that she found a not unworthy
+satisfaction in feeling and proving to the little world around her, that
+she also was a person of weight and consequence.
+
+But her childish kindness availed not. The time of Mrs. Gray had come;
+she too was to depart from a world where toil and few joys, and some
+heavy sorrows had been her portion. Mary and Rachel were alone with her
+in that hour.
+
+Mary was busy about the room. Rachel sat by her mother's bed. Pale and
+languid, Mrs. Gray turned to her step-daughter, and gathering her
+remaining strength to speak, she said feebly: "My poor Rachel, I am
+afraid I have often teazed and tormented you. It was all temper; but I
+never meant it unkindly--never indeed. And then, you see, Rachel," she
+added, true to her old spirit of patronizing and misunderstanding her
+step-daughter, "Your not being exactly like others provoked me at times;
+but I know it shouldn't--it wasn't fair to you, poor girl! for of course
+you couldn't help it."
+
+And Rachel, true to her spirit of humble submission, only smiled, and
+kissed her mother's wasted cheek, and said, meekly: "Do not think of it,
+dear mother--do not; you were not to blame."
+
+And she did not murmur, even in her heart. She did not find it hard that
+to the end she should be slighted, and held as one of little worth.
+
+A little while after this, Mrs. Gray spoke again. "Where is Mary?" she
+said.
+
+"And here I am, Mrs. Gray," said Mary, coming up to her on the other side
+of the bed.
+
+Mrs. Gray smiled, and stretched out her trembling hands, until they met
+and clasped those of the young girl. Then, with her fading eyes fixed on
+Mary's face, she said to Rachel:
+
+"Rachel, tell your father that I forgive him, will you?"
+
+"Yes, mother," replied Rachel, in a low tone.
+
+"Rachel," she said again, and her weak voice rose, "Rachel, you have been
+a good and a faithful daughter to me--may the Lord bless you!"
+
+Tears streamed down Rachel's face on hearing those few words that paid
+her for many a bitter hour; but her mother saw them not, still her look
+sought Mary.
+
+"In Thy hands, Lord, I commend my spirit," she murmured, and with her
+look still fastened on little Mary's pale face, she died.
+
+Sad and empty seemed the house to Rachel Gray when her mother was gone.
+She missed her chiding voice, her step, heavy with age, her very
+scolding, which long habit had made light to bear.
+
+The solitude and liberty once so dear and so hardly won, now became
+painful and oppressive; but Rachel was not long troubled with either.
+
+We are told that "he whom He loveth He chasteneth;" and Rachel was not
+unloved, for she, too, was to have her share of affliction. Spite her
+sickly aspect, she enjoyed good health, and, therefore, when she rose one
+morning, shortly after her mother's death, and felt unusually languid and
+unwell, Rachel was more surprised than alarmed.
+
+"La, Miss! how poorly you do look!" exclaimed Jane, laying down her work
+with concern.
+
+"I do not feel very well," replied Rachel, calmly, "but I do not feel
+very ill, either," she added, smiling.
+
+Her looks belied her words; vainly she endeavoured to work; by the united
+entreaties of Jane and Mary, she was at length persuaded to go up to her
+room. She laid down on her bed, and tried to sleep, but could not; she
+thought of her step-mother, so harsh, yet so kind in her very harshness;
+of her father, so cold and unloving; of her silent, lonely life, and its
+narrow cares and narrow duties, above which smiled so heavenly a hope,
+burning like a clear star above a dark and rugged valley; and with these
+thoughts and feelings, heightening them to intensity, blended the heat
+and languor of growing fever.
+
+When Mary came up to know if Rachel Gray wanted anything, she found her
+so ill that she could scarcely answer her question. She grew rapidly
+worse. The medical man who was called in, pronounced her disease a slow
+fever, not dangerous, but wasting.
+
+"Then there is nothing for it but patience," resignedly said Rachel, "I
+fear I shall be the cause of trouble to those around me, but the will of
+God be done."
+
+"La, Miss! we'll take care of you," zealously said Jane, "shan't we,
+Mary?"
+
+"Of course we will," as zealously replied the young girl.
+
+Rachel smiled at their earnestness; but their zeal was destined to be
+thrown in the shade by that of a third individual. On the fourth day of
+her illness, Rachel was awakened from a heavy sleep into which she had
+fallen, by the sound of angry though subdued voices on the staircase.
+
+"I tell you 'taint a bit of use, and that you're not going to go up,"
+said the deep, emphatic tones of Jane.
+
+"Et je vous dis que je veux monter, moi!" obstinately exclaimed the
+shrill French voice of Madame Rose.
+
+Jane, who was not patient, now apparently resorted to that last argument
+of kings and nations, physical force, to remove the intruder, for there
+was the sound of a scuffle on the staircase, but if she had strength on
+her side, Madame Rose had agility, and though somewhat ruffled and out of
+breath, she victoriously burst into Rachel's room.
+
+"Take care, Miss, take care," screamed Jane, rushing up after her, "the
+French madwoman has got in, and I couldn't keep her out."
+
+"Don't be afraid, Jane," said Rachel, as the alarmed apprentice made her
+appearance at the door, "I am very glad to see Madame Rose. I tell you
+she will not hurt me, and that I am glad to see her," she added, as Jane
+stared grimly at the intruder.
+
+She spoke so positively, that the apprentice retired, but not without
+emphatically intimating that she should be within call if Miss Gray
+wanted her.
+
+Rachel was too ill to speak much; but Madame Rose spared her the trouble
+by taking that task on herself; indeed, she seemed willing to take a
+great deal on herself, and listless as Rachel was, she perceived with
+surprise that Madame Rose was in some measure taking possession of her
+sick room. She inquired after Mimi. Madame Rose shook her head, produced
+a square pocket-handkerchief, applied it to her eyes, then turned them
+up, till the whites alone were visible; in short, she plainly intimated
+that Mimi had gone to her last home; after which she promptly dried her
+tears, and, partly by speech, partly by pantomime, she informed Rachel
+that the apprentices were too busy sewing to be able to attend on her,
+and that she--Madame Rose--would undertake that care. Rachel was too
+ill and languid to resist; and Jane and Mary, though they resented the
+intrusion of the foreigner, were unable to eject her, for, by possession,
+which is acknowledged to be nine-tenths of the law, Madame Rose made her
+claim good, until the enemy had abandoned all idea of resistance.
+
+And a devoted nurse she made, ever attentive, ever vigilant. For three
+months did Rachel see, in her darkened room, the active little figure of
+the Frenchwoman, either moving briskly about, or sitting erect in her
+chair, knitting assiduously, occasionally relieved, it is true, by Jane
+and Mary. She saw it when she lay in the trance of fever and pain, unable
+to move or speak; in her few moments of languid relief, it was still
+there, and it became so linked, in her mind, with her sick room, that,
+when she awoke one day free from fever, the delightful sensation that
+pain was gone from her, like the weary dream of a troubled night fled in
+the morning, blended with a sense of surprise and annoyance at missing
+the nod and the smile of Madame Rose.
+
+Rachel looked around her wondering, and in looking, she caught sight of
+the portly and vulgar figure of Mrs. Brown; she saw her with some
+surprise, for she knew that that lady entertained a strong horror of a
+sick room.
+
+"It's only me!" said Mrs. Brown, nodding at her. "You are all right now,
+my girl."
+
+"I feel much better, indeed," replied Rachel
+
+"Of course you do; the fever is all gone, otherwise you should not see me
+here, I promise you," added Mrs. Brown, with another nod, and a knowing
+wink.
+
+"And Madame Rose," said Rachel, "where is Madame Rose?"
+
+"Law! don't trouble your mind about her. Keep quiet, will you?"
+
+Mrs. Brown spoke impatiently. Rachel felt too weak to dispute her
+authority, but when Jane came up, she again inquired after Madame Rose.
+Jane drily said it was all right, and that Miss Gray was to keep quiet;
+and more than this she would not say.
+
+The fever had left Rachel. She was now cured, and rapidly got better; but
+still, she did not see Madame Rose, and was favoured with more of Mrs.
+Brown's company than she liked. At length she one day positively exacted
+an explanation from Jane, who reluctantly gave it.
+
+"Law bless you, Miss!" she said, '"tain't worth talking about. Mrs. Brown
+can't abide the little Frenchwoman; and so, one day when she went out,
+she locked the door, and wouldn't let Mary open it; and when Madame Rose
+rang and rapped, Mrs. Brown put her head out of the window, and railed at
+her, until she fairly scared her away from the place."
+
+"But what brought Mrs. Brown here?" asked Rachel, who had heard her with
+much surprise.
+
+Jane looked embarrassed, but was spared the trouble of replying by the
+voice of Mrs. Brown, who imperatively summoned her downstairs. She
+immediately complied, and left Rachel alone. A mild sun shone in through
+the open window on the sick girl; she had that day got up, for the first
+time, and sat in a chair with a book on her knees. But she could not
+read: she felt too happy, blest in that delightful sense of returning
+health which long sickness renders so sweet. Her whole soul overflowed
+with joy, thankfulness, and prayer, and for once the shadow of sad or
+subduing thoughts fell not on her joy.
+
+"Well, my girl, and how are you to-day?" said the rough voice of Mrs.
+Brown, who entered without the ceremony of knocking.
+
+Rachel quietly replied that she felt well--almost quite well.
+
+"Of course you do. I knew I'd bring you round," said Mrs. Brown. "La
+bless you! all their coddling was just killing you. So I told Jane, all
+along, but she wouldn't believe me. 'La bless you, girl!' I said to her,
+'I do it willingly, but ifs only just a wasting of my money,' says I."
+
+"Your money, Mrs. Brown?" interrupted Rachel, with a start.
+
+"Why, of course, my money. Whose else? Didn't you know of it?"
+
+"Indeed, I did not," replied Rachel, confounded.
+
+"La! what a muff the girl is!" good-humouredly observed Mrs. Brown. "And
+where did you think, stupid, that the money you have been nursed with
+these three months came from? Why, from my pocket, of course; twenty
+pound three-and-six, besides a quarter's rent, and another running on."
+
+Rachel was dismayed at the amount of the debt. When and how should she be
+able to pay so large a sum? Still, rallying from her first feeling of
+surprise and dismay, she attempted to express to Mrs. Brown her gratitude
+for the assistance so generously yielded, and her hope of being able to
+repay it some day; but Mrs. Brown would not hear her.
+
+"Nonsense, Rachel," she said, "I ain't a-done more than I ought to have
+done for my cousin's step-daughter. And to whom should Jane, when she
+wanted money, have come, but to me? And as to paying me, bless you!
+there's no hurry, Rachel. I can afford, thank Heaven, to lend twenty
+pound, and not miss it."
+
+This was kindness--such Rachel felt it to be; but, alas! she also felt
+that these was on her, from that day, the badge of obligation and
+servitude. She was still too weak to work; she had, dining her long
+illness, lost the best part of her customers; until her full recovery,
+she was, perforce, cast on Mrs. Brown for assistance, and, of all
+persons, Mrs. Brown was the last not to take advantage of such a state of
+things. Mrs. Brown came when she liked, said what she liked, and did what
+she liked in Rachel's house. But, indeed, it was not Rachel's house--it
+was Mrs. Brown's. Rachel was there on sufferance; the very bed on which
+she slept was Mrs. Brown's; the very chair on which she sat was Mrs.
+Brown's. So Mrs. Brown felt, and made every one feel, Rachel included.
+
+The effects of her rule were soon apparent. Every article of furniture
+changed its place; every household nook was carefully examined and
+improved, and every luckless individual who entertained a lingering
+kindness for Rachel Gray, was affronted, and effectually banished from
+the house, from irascible Madame Rose down to peaceful Mr. Jones.
+
+Rachel carried patience to a fault; through her whole life, she had been
+taught to suffer and endure silently, and now, burdened with the sense of
+her debt and obligation, she knew not how to resist the domestic tyranny
+of this new tormentor. The easiest course was to submit. To Rachel it
+seemed that such, in common gratitude, was her duty; and, accordingly,
+she submitted. But this was a time of probation and trial: as such she
+ever looked back to it, in after life. To Jane, her patience seemed
+amazing, and scarcely commendable.
+
+"I wonder you can bear with the old creetur, that I do," she said,
+emphatically.
+
+"Mrs. Brown means kindly," said Rachel, "and she has been a kind friend
+to me, when I had no other friend. I may well hare a little patience."
+
+"A little patience!" echoed Jane, indignantly, "a little patience! when
+she's always at you."
+
+But Rachel would hear no more on the subject. If she bore with Mrs.
+Brown, it was not to murmur at her behind her back. Yet she was not so
+insensible to what she endured, but that she felt it a positive relief
+when Mrs. Brown went and paid one of her nieces a visit in the country,
+and for a few weeks delivered the house of her presence. Internally,
+Rachel accused herself of ingratitude because she felt glad. "It's very
+wrong of me, I know," she remorsefully thought, "but I feel as if I could
+not help it."
+
+Her health was now restored. She had found some work to do; with time she
+knew she should be able to pay Mrs. Brown. Her mind recovered its
+habitual tone; old thoughts, old feelings, laid by during the hour of
+trial and sickness, but never forsaken, returned to her now, and time, as
+it passed on, matured a great thought in her heart.
+
+"Who knows," she often asked herself, in her waking dreams, "who knows if
+the hour is not come at last? My father cannot always turn his face from
+me. Love me at once he cannot; but why should he not with time?" Yet it
+was not at once that Rachel acted on these thoughts. Never since he had
+received her so coldly, had she crossed her father's threshold; but
+often, in the evening, she had walked up and down before his door,
+looking at him through the shop window with sad and earnest eyes, never
+seeking for more than that stolen glance, though still with the
+persistency of a fond heart, she looked forward to a happier future.
+
+And thus she lingered until one morning, when she rose, nerved her heart,
+and went out; calmly resolved to bear as others, to act.
+
+She went to her father's house. She found him sturdy and stern, planing
+with the vigour of a man in the prime of life. His brow became clouded,
+as he saw and recognized his daughter's pale face and shrinking figure.
+Still he bade her come in, for she stood on the threshold timidly waiting
+for a welcome; and his ungraciousness was limited to the cold question of
+what had brought her.
+
+"I am come to see you, father," was her mild reply. And as to this Thomas
+Gray said nothing, Rachel added: "My mother is dead."
+
+"I know it, and have known it these three months," he drily answered.
+
+"She died very happy," resumed Rachel, "and before she died, she desired
+me to come and tell you that she sincerely forgave you all past
+unkindness."
+
+A frown knit the rugged brow of Thomas Gray. His late wife had had a
+sharp temper of her own; and perhaps he thought himself as much sinned
+against as sinning. But he made no comment.
+
+"Father," said Rachel, speaking from her very heart, and looking
+earnestly in his face, "may I come and live with you?"
+
+Thomas Gray looked steadily at his daughter, and did not reply. But
+Rachel, resolved not to be easily disheartened, persisted none the less.
+"Father," she resumed, and her voice faltered with the depth of her
+emotion, "pray let me. I know you do not care much for me. I dare say you
+are right, that I am not worth much; but still I might be useful to you.
+A burden I certainly should not be; and in sickness, in age, I think, I
+hope, father, you would like to have your daughter near you.
+
+"I am now your only child," she added, after a moment's pause; "the only
+living thing of your blood, not one relative have I in this wide world;
+and you, father, you too are alone. Let me come to live with you. Pray
+let me! If my presence is irksome to you," added Rachel, gazing wistfully
+in his face, as both hope and courage began to fail her, "I shall keep
+out of the way. Indeed, indeed," she added with tears in her eyes, "I
+shall."
+
+He had heard her out very quietly, and very quietly he replied: "Rachel,
+what did I go to America for?"
+
+Rachel, rather bewildered with the question, faltered that she did not
+know.
+
+"And what did I come to live here for?" he continued.
+
+Rachel did not answer; but there was a sad foreboding in her heart.
+
+"To be alone," he resumed; and he spoke with some sternness, "to be
+alone." And he went back to his planing.
+
+With tears which he saw not, Rachel looked at the stern, selfish old man,
+whom she called her father. The sentence which he had uttered, rung in
+her heart; but she did not venture to dispute its justice. Her simple
+pleading had been heard and rejected. More than she had said, she could
+not say; and it did not occur to her to urge a second time the homely
+eloquence which had so signally failed when first spoken. But she made
+bold to prefer a timid and humble petition. "Might she come to see him?"
+
+"What for?" he bluntly asked.
+
+"To see how you are, father," replied poor Rachel.
+
+"How I am," he echoed, with a suspicious gathering of the brow, "and why
+shouldn't I be well, just tell me that?"
+
+"It might please Providence to afflict you with sickness," began Rachel.
+
+"Sickness, sickness," he interrupted; indignantly, "I tell you, woman, I
+never was sick in my life. Is there the sign of illness, or of disease
+upon me?"
+
+"No, indeed, father, there is not."
+
+"And could you find a man of my age half so healthy, and so strong as I
+am--just tell me that?" he rather defiantly asked.
+
+Poor Rachel was literal as truth. Instead of eluding a reply, she simply
+said: "I have seen stronger men than you, father."
+
+"Oh I you have--have you!" he ejaculated eyeing her with very little
+favour.
+
+And though Rachel was not unconscious of her offence, she added: "And
+strong or weak, father, are we not all in the hands of God?"
+
+From beneath his bushy grey eyebrows, Thomas Gray looked askance at his
+daughter; but love often rises to a fearlessness that makes it heroic,
+and Rachel, not daunted, resumed: "Father," she said, earnestly, "you do
+not want me now; I know and see it, but if ever you should--and that
+time may come, pray, father, pray send for me."
+
+"Want you? and what should I want you for?" asked Thomas Gray.
+
+"I cannot tell, I do not know; but you might want me. Remember, that if
+you do, you have but to send for me. I am willing, ever willing."
+
+He looked at her as she stood there before him, a pale, sallow, sickly
+girl, then he laughed disdainfully, and impatiently motioned her away, as
+if his temper were chafed at her continued presence. Rachel felt, indeed,
+that her visit had been sufficiently long, and not wishing to close on
+herself the possibility of return--for she had one of those quietly
+pertinacious natures that never give up hope--she calmly bade her father
+good-bye. Without looking at her, he muttered an unintelligible reply.
+Rachel left the shop, and returned to her quiet street and solitary home.
+
+Yet solitary she did not find it. True, Jane was out on some errand or
+other, but Mary was alone in the parlour. She sat with her work on her
+lap, crying as if her heart would break.
+
+In vain she tried to hide or check her tears; Rachel saw Mary's grief,
+and forgetting at once her own troubles, she kindly sat down by the young
+girl, and asked what ailed her.
+
+At first, Mary would not speak, then suddenly she threw her arms around
+Rachel's neck, and with a fresh burst of tears, she exclaimed: "Oh! dear,
+dear Miss Gray! I am so miserable."
+
+"What for, child?" asked Rachel astonished.
+
+"He's gone--he's gone!" sobbed Mary.
+
+"Who is gone, my dear?"
+
+Mary hung down her head. But Rachel pressed her so kindly to speak, that
+her heart opened, and with many a hesitating pause, and many a qualifying
+comment, Mary Jones related to her kind-hearted listener a little story,
+which, lest the reader should not prove so indulgent, or so patient as
+Rachel Gray, we will relate in language plainer and more brief.
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+
+Time had worn on: nine months in all had passed away since the opening of
+the Teapot.
+
+We must be quite frank: Mr. Jones had not always made the one pound ten a
+week dear profit; and of course this affected all his calculations: the
+ten per cent for increase of gain included. There had been weeks when he
+had not realized more than one pound, others when he made ten shillings,
+ay and there had been weeks when all he could do--if he did do so--was
+to make both ends meet. It was odd; but it was so. Mr. Jones was at first
+much startled; but, he soon learned to reconcile himself to it.
+
+"It stands to reason," he philosophically observed to Mary, "it's
+business, you see, it's business." The words explained all.
+
+Another drawback was that the front room which was worth five shillings a
+week, as his landlord had proved to Mr. Jones in their very first
+conversation, and for which Mr. Jones had therefore allowed--on the
+faith of his landlord's word--thirteen pounds a year in his accounts--
+never let at all. This was the first intimation Mr. Jones received of the
+practical business truth, that it is necessary to allow for losses.
+
+He had almost given up all thoughts of letting this unfortunate room, and
+indeed the bill had had time to turn shabby and yellow in the shop
+window, when one morning a young man entered the shop and in a cool
+deliberate tone said: "Room to let?"
+
+"Yes, Sir," replied Jones rather impressed by his brief manner.
+
+"Back or front?"
+
+"Front, Sir, front. Capital room, Sir!"
+
+"Terms?"
+
+"Five shillings a-week, Sir. A room worth six shillings, anywhere else.
+Like to see it, Sir? Mary--Mary, dear, just mind the shop awhile, will
+you?"
+
+Mary came grumbling at being disturbed, whilst her father hastened
+upstairs before the stranger, and throwing the window open, showed him a
+very dusty room, not over and above well furnished.
+
+"Capital room. Sir!" said Mr. Jones, winking shrewdly; "real Brussels
+carpet; portrait of Her Majesty above the mantel-piece; and that bed, Sir
+--just feel that bed, Sir," he added, giving it a vigorous poke, by way
+of proving its softness; "very cheerful look-out, too; the railroad just
+hard by--see all the trains passing."
+
+Without much minding these advantages, the stranger cast a quick look
+round the room, then said in his curt way: "Take four shillings for it?
+Yes. Well then, I'll come to-night."
+
+And without giving Mr. Jones time to reply, he walked downstairs, and
+walked out through the shop.
+
+"Well, father, have you let the room?" asked Mary, when her father came
+down, still bewildered by the young man's strange and abrupt manner.
+
+"Well, child," he replied, "I suppose I may say I have, for the young man
+is coming to-night."
+
+"What's his name?" promptly asked Mary.
+
+"I'm blest if I know; he never told me, nor gave me time to ask."
+
+"But, father, you don't mean to say you let the room to him, without
+knowing his name?"
+
+"But I didn't let the room to him," said Mr. Jones; "it was he took it."
+
+"Well, that's queer!" said Mary.
+
+"Queer! I call it more than queer!" exclaimed the grocer, now turning
+indignant at the treatment he had received; "but he shan't sleep in it,
+though, till I've got his references, I can tell him."
+
+The words were scarcely out of his mouth, when into the shop again walked
+the stranger.
+
+"My name is Joseph Saunders," he said, briefly, "and if you want to know
+more, apply to Mr. Smithson, number thirteen, in the alley hard by. He'll
+give you all the particulars."
+
+Having delivered which piece of information, he once more vanished. Well,
+there was nothing to say to this; and Mr. Jones, who had an inquisitive
+temper, was preparing to dart off to Mr. Smithson's, who did indeed live
+hard by, when Mr. Joseph Saunders once more appeared.
+
+"P'r'aps you'd like the first week," he said; and without waiting for a
+reply, he laid four shillings down on the counter, and again disappeared
+--this time to return no more. Mary was very much struck.
+
+"He looks quite superior," she said, "quite. Saunders--Joseph Saunders!
+what a nice name."
+
+"That's all very well," replied her father, sweeping the four shillings
+into the till, "but I must have a word or two to say with Mr. Smithson--
+for all that his name is Joseph Saunders."
+
+He took his hat, and walked out to seek Mr. Smithson, an old and stiff
+dealer in earthenware, who lived within a stone's-throw of the Teapot.
+The day was fine, and Mr. Smithson was airing his pans and dishes, and
+setting them along the pavement, like traps for the feet of unwary
+passengers.
+
+"Good-morning to you," began Jones, in a conciliating tone.
+
+"Good-morning!" replied, or rather, grunted Mr. Smithson, without taking
+the trouble to look up.
+
+"I have just come round to inquire about a young man--his name is Joseph
+Saunders. Do you know him?"
+
+"S'pose I do?" answered Mr. Smithson too cautious to commit himself.
+
+"Well then, s'pose you do--you can tell me something about him, can't
+you?"
+
+"What for?" drily asked the earthenware dealer.
+
+"What for!" exclaimed Mr. Jones, beginning to lose his temper, "why,
+because he's taken my front room, and I want to know what sort of a chap
+he is, and because, too, he has referred me to you--that's what for."
+
+"Well, then," said Mr. Smithson, "I'll just tell you this: first, he'll
+pay his rent; second, he'll give no trouble; third, that's all."
+
+With which Mr. Smithson, who had for a moment looked up, and paused in
+his occupation, returned to his earthenware.
+
+"And what does he do?" asked Mr. Jones, not satisfied with this brief
+account.
+
+"If you was to stay here from now till to-morrow morning," surlily
+replied Mr. Smithson, "you'd know no more from me."
+
+Mr. Jones whistled, and walked off, with his hands in his pockets. He had
+been guilty of the unpardonable sin of not purchasing a shilling's worth
+of Mr. Smithson's goods since he had come to the neighbourhood, and of
+course Mr. Smithson felt aggrieved.
+
+"Well, father," eagerly exclaimed Mary, as soon as she saw her father;
+"who is he? What is he? What does he do? Is he married--"
+
+"Bless the girl!" interrupted Mr. Jones, "how am I to know all that?
+He'll pay his rent, and he's respectable, and more don't concern us; and
+it's time for you to go to Miss Gray, ain't it?"
+
+With which limited information Mary had, perforce, to remain satisfied.
+
+The new lodger proved to be what Mr. Jones graphically termed "a very
+buttoned-up sort of chap;" a tall, dark, silent, and reserved man, who
+paid his rent every week, went out early every morning, came home at ten
+every night, and vanished every Sunday.
+
+We have already hinted that Mr. Jones had a spice of curiosity; this
+mystery teazed him, and by dint of waylaying his guest both early and
+late, he succeeded in ascertaining that he had recently left his
+situation in a large house in the city, and that he was in search of
+another. No more did Mr. Joseph Saunders choose to communicate; but this
+was enough.
+
+For some time, the poor grocer had had a strong suspicion that he was not
+a very good business man; that he wanted something; energy, daring, he
+knew not what, but something he was sure it was.
+
+"Now," he thought, "if I could secure such a young fellow as that; it
+would be a capital thing for me, and in time not a bad one for him. For
+suppose, that he becomes a Co., and marries Mary, why the house is his,
+that's all. Now I should like to know what man in the city will say to
+him: 'Saunders, I'll make a Co. of you, and you shall have my daughter.'"
+
+Fully impressed with the importance of the proposal he had to make, Mr.
+Jones accordingly walked up one morning to his lodger's room; and after a
+gentle knock, obtained admittance. But scarcely had he entered the room,
+scarcely cast a look around him, when his heart failed him, Joseph
+Saunders was packing up.
+
+"Going, Sir?" faintly said Jones.
+
+"Why yes!" replied the young man, "I have found a situation, and so I am
+off naturally. My week is up to-morrow, I believe, but not having given
+notice, I shall pay for next, of course."
+
+He thrust his hand in his pocket as he spoke. Poor Mr. Jones was too much
+hurt with his disappointment to care about the four shillings.
+
+"Pray don't mention it," he said hurriedly, "your time's up to-morrow,
+and so there's an end of it all." Which words applied to the end of his
+hopes, more than anything else.
+
+Mr. Saunders gave him a look of slight surprise, but said quietly: "No,
+no, Mr. Jones, what's fair is fair. I gave no notice, and so here are
+your four shillings." He laid them on the table as he spoke; and resumed
+his packing.
+
+He forgot to ask what had brought Mr. Jones up to his room, and Mr. Jones
+no longer anxious to tell him, pocketed his four shillings and withdrew
+hastily, under pretence that he was wanted in the shop.
+
+Mr. Jones had not acted in all this without consulting his daughter; she
+had tacitly approved his plans, and when he had imprudently allowed her
+to see how he thought those plans likely to end by a matrimonial alliance
+between herself and young Saunders, a faint blush had come over the poor
+little thing's sallow face, and stooping to shun her father's kind eye,
+she pretended to pick up a needle that had not fallen. And now she was
+waiting, below, for it was early yet, and she had not gone to Miss Gray's
+--she was waiting to know the result of her father's conference with Mr.
+Saunders. No wonder that he came down somewhat slowly, and not a little
+crest-fallen. All he said was: "He's got a new situation," and whistling
+by way of showing his utter unconcern, he entered the shop, where a dirty
+child with its chin resting on the counter, was waiting to be served.
+
+Mary too had had her dreams, innocent dreams, made up of the shadow of
+love, and of the substance of girlish vanity. The poor child felt this
+blow, the first her little life had known, and childishly began to cry.
+Her eyes were red when she went to work, but she sat in shadow, and Jane,
+who seldom honoured Miss Jones with her notice, saw nothing. Rachel Gray
+was too much absorbed in her own thoughts to heed what passed around her.
+
+It was only on her return, that finding Mary in tears, she drew from her
+the little tale of her hope and disappointment. It is not an easy task to
+console, even the lightest sorrow, for it is not easy to feel sympathy.
+Yet little as her grave mind, and earnest heart could understand the
+troubles of Mary Jones, little as she could feel in reality for the
+childish fancy to which they owed their birth, Rachel felt for the young
+girl's grief, such as it was, and by sympathy and mild reasoning, she
+soothed Mary, and sent her home partly consoled.
+
+Of course, Mr. Saunders was gone--he had left too without any adieu or
+message. Mary's vanity was as much hurt as her heart.
+
+Mr. Jones was not habitually a man of keen perceptions, but love is ever
+quick. It cut him to the heart to see his little Mary so woebegone. He
+looked at her wistfully, tried to check a sigh, and said as brightly as
+he could:
+
+"Cheer up, Mary; law bless you girl, well have lots of lodgers yet; and
+as to that Saunders, I don't so much care about it, now he's gone. He was
+a clever fellow, but he hadn't got no capital, and as to taking a Co.
+without capital, why none but a good-natured easy fellow like me would
+dream of such a thing now a days; but, as I said, we'll have lots of
+lodgers--lots of lodgers."
+
+"We never had but that one all them nine months," said Mary with some
+asperity.
+
+"They're all a coming," said her father gaily, "They're all a coming."
+
+And he said it in such droll fashion, and winked so knowingly that, do
+what she could, Mary could not but laugh.
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+
+Mary was gone; Jane, had come in but to go up to her room. Rachel sat
+alone in the little parlour, reading by candle-light.
+
+And did she read, indeed! Alas no! Her will fixed her eyes on the page,
+but her mind received not the impressions it conveyed. The sentences were
+vague and broken as images in a dream; the words had no meaning.
+Outwardly, calm as ever did Rachel seem, but there was a strange sorrow--
+a strange tumult in her heart.
+
+That day the hope of years had been wrecked, that day she had offered
+herself, and been finally rejected. In vain she said to herself: "I must
+submit--it is the will of God, I must submit." A voice within her ever
+seemed to say: "Father, Father why hast thou forsaken me!" until, at
+length, Rachel felt as if she could bear no more.
+
+Sorrows endured in silence are ever doubly felt. The nature of Rachel
+Gray was silent; she had never asked for sympathy; she had early been
+taught to expect and accept in its stead, its bitter step-sister
+Ridicule. Derided, laughed at, she had learned to dread that the look of
+a human being should catch a glimpse of her sorrows. If her little
+troubles were thus treated--how would her heavier griefs fare?
+
+And now no more than ever did Rachel trouble any with her burden. Why
+should she? Who, what was she that others should care whether or not her
+father loved her! That he did not sufficiently, condemned her to
+solitude. The pitying eye of God might, indeed, look down upon her with
+tenderness and love, but from her brethren Rachel expected nothing.
+
+And thus it was that, on this night, after consoling the idle sorrows of
+an indulged child, Rachel, sitting in solitude, found the weight of her
+own grief almost intolerable. Like all shy and nervous persons, she was
+deeply excitable. Anger she knew not; but emotions as vehement, though
+more pure, could trouble her heart. And now she was moved, and deeply
+moved, by a sense of injustice and of wrong. Her father wronged her--
+perhaps he knew it not; but he wronged her. "God Almighty had not given
+him a child, she felt, to treat it thus, with mingled dislike and
+contempt Were there none to receive his slights and his scorn, but his
+own daughter?"
+
+She rose, and walked up and down the room with some agitation. Then came
+calmer and gentler thoughts, moving her heart until her tears flowed
+freely. Had she not failed that day--had she not been too cold in her
+entreaties, too easily daunted by the first rejection? Had she but
+allowed her father to see the love, deep and fervent, which burned in his
+daughter's heart--he would not, he could not so coldly have repelled and
+cast her from him.
+
+"And why not try again?" murmured an inner voice; "the kingdom of Heaven
+is taken by storm--and what is the kingdom of Heaven, but the realm of
+love?"
+
+At first, this seemed a thought so wild, that Rachel drew back from it in
+alarm, as from an abyss yawning at her feet. But even as our looks soon
+become familiar with images of the wildest danger, so the thought
+returned; and she shrank not back from it. Besides, what had she to lose?
+Nothing! With a sort of despair, she resolved to go and seek Thomas Gray,
+and attempt once more to move him. "If he rejects me now," she added,
+inwardly, "I shall submit, and trouble him no more."
+
+The hour was not late; besides, in her present mood, the timid Rachel
+felt above fear. She was soon dressed--soon on her road. This time
+neither annoyance nor evil befell her. She passed like a shadow through
+crowds, and like a shadow was unheeded. The night was dark and dreary; a
+keen wind whistled along the streets--but for either cold or darkness
+Rachel cared not. Her thoughts flowed full and free in her brain; for
+once, she felt that she could speak; and a joyful presentiment in her
+heart told her that she would, and should be heard--and not in vain.
+
+Absorbed in those thoughts, Rachel scarcely knew what speed she had made,
+until, with the mechanical impulse of habit, she found herself stopping
+before the second hand ironmonger's shop. Wakening as from a dream, and
+smiling at herself, she went on. Rachel had expected to find the shop of
+Thomas Gray closed, and himself absent; but the light that burned from
+his dwelling, and shed its glow on the opposite houses, made her heart
+beat with joy and hope. Timidly, she looked in through the glass panes;
+the shop was vacant; her father was, no doubt, in the back parlour.
+Rachel entered; the door-bell rang. She paused on the threshold,
+expecting to see him appear from within, nerving herself to bear his cold
+look, and severe aspect; but he came not He was either up-stairs, or in
+some other part of the house, or next door with a neighbour.
+
+There was a chair in the shop; Rachel took it, sat down, and waited--how
+long, she herself never knew; for seconds seemed hours, and all true
+consciousness of time had left her. At length, she wondered; then she
+feared--why was her father's house so silent and so deserted? She went
+to the door, and looked down the street. It was still and lonely; every
+house was shot up; and even from the neighbouring thoroughfare, all
+sounds of motion and life seemed gone.
+
+Suddenly Rachel remembered the little public-house to which her father
+had once sent her. She had often seen him going to it in the evening;
+perhaps he was there now. In the shadow of the houses, she glided up to
+the tavern door--it stood half open--she cautiously looked in; and
+standing, as she did in the gloom of the street, she could do so unseen.
+The landlord sat dozing in the bar--not a soul was with him. Rachel
+glanced at the clock above his head; it marked a quarter to twelve.
+Dismayed and alarmed, she returned to her father's house. It so chanced,
+that as she walked on the opposite side of the narrow street, a
+circumstance that had before escaped her notice, now struck her. In the
+room above the shop of Thomas Gray, there burned a light. She stopped
+short, and looked at it with a beating heart. She felt sure her father
+was there.
+
+Rachel re-entered the shop, and again sat down, resolved to be patient;
+but her nervous restlessness soon became intolerable. Seized with an
+indefinite fear, she rose, took the light, and entered the parlour: it
+was vacant. Passing under a low door which she found ajar, she went up a
+dark staircase. It ended with a narrow landing, and a solitary door; she
+knocked, and got no reply; she tried it, it yielded to her hand, and
+opened; but Rachel did not cross the threshold; she paused upon it,
+awe-struck at the sight she saw. The room was a small one, poorly
+famished, with a low and narrow bed, a table and a few chairs. On the
+mantle-shelf burned a tallow light, dim and lurid for want of snuffing;
+its dull glow fell on the motionless figure of Thomas Gray. He sat
+straight and stiff in a wooden chair, with a hand resting on each arm.
+His face was ghastly pale, and rigid as death; his eyes stared on the
+blank wall before him, and seemed void of sight.
+
+"My father is dead," thought Rachel. She entered the room and went up to
+him. But when she laid her hand on his arm, a slight convulsive motion
+showed her that he still lived. Ay, he lived, of that living death, which
+is worse than the true. Paralysis had fallen upon him without warning.
+Like a thief in the night it had come; and in a few brief seconds it had
+laid low the proud man's strength. Of that strength he had boasted in the
+morning; twelve hours had not gone round--where was it now?
+
+Rachel did not lose her presence of mind. How she went out, found a
+doctor, and brought him back, she never exactly knew; but she did it.
+
+The medical man looked at Thomas Gray, then at Rachel.
+
+"You are his daughter," he said, kindly.
+
+"Yes, sir, I am."
+
+"Well, then, my poor girl, I am very sorry for you--very sorry. Your
+father may live years but I can hold out no prospect of recovery."
+
+"None, sir?" faltered Rachel, looking wistfully in his face.
+
+"Not the least. Better I should tell you so at once, than deceive you."
+
+But Rachel would not--could not believe him. The sentence was too hard,
+too pitiless to be true.
+
+"Father, father! do you know me?" she cried.
+
+He stared vacantly in her face. Did he know her? Perhaps he did. Who can
+tell how far the spirit lived in that dead body? But if know her he did,
+gone was the time when he could hold intercourse with that long slighted,
+and now bitterly avenged daughter.
+
+In vain she clung weeping around his neck, in vain she called on him to
+reply. He merely looked at her in the same vacant way, and said
+childishly, "Never mind."
+
+"But you know me--you know me, father!" said Rachel.
+
+Again, he looked at her vacantly, and still the only words he uttered
+were, "Never mind."
+
+"His mind is gone for ever," said the doctor.
+
+Rachel did not answer. She clasped her hands, and looked with wistful
+sadness on the old man's blank face. With a pang she felt and saw that
+now, indeed, her dream was over--that never, never upon earth, should
+she win that long hoped-for treasure--her father's love.
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+
+In the grey of the morning, Rachel brought her father to the humble
+little home which he had voluntarily forsaken years before.
+
+Thomas Gray was not merely a paralyzed and helpless old man, he was also
+destitute. Little more than what sufficed to cover his current expenses
+did Rachel find in his dwelling; his furniture was old and worthless; and
+the good-will of the business scarcely paid the arrears of rent.
+
+But the world rarely gives us credit for good motives. It was currently
+reported that Thomas Gray was a wealthy man, and that if Rachel Gray did
+not let him go to the workhouse, she knew why. "As if she couldn't let
+him go, and keep his money too," indignantly exclaimed Jane, when she
+heard this slander; and, as discretion was not Jane's virtue, she
+repeated all to Rachel Gray. Poor Rachel coloured slightly. It seemed
+strange, and somewhat hard too, that her conduct should be judged thus.
+But the flush passed from her pale face, and the momentary emotion from
+her heart. "Let the world think, and say what it likes," she thought, "I
+need not, and I will not care."
+
+Not long after Rachel brought home her father, Jane left her. The time of
+her apprenticeship was out; besides, she was going to marry. She showed
+more emotion on their parting, than might have been expected from her.
+
+"God bless you. Miss Gray," she said several times; "God bless you--you
+are a good one, whatever the world may think."
+
+The praise was qualified, and, perhaps, Rachel felt it to be so, for she
+smiled; but she took it as Jane meant it--kindly. Amity and peace marked
+their separation.
+
+Rachel now remained alone with her father and Mary. The young girl was
+not observant. She saw but a quiet woman, and a helpless old man, with
+grey hair, and stern features blank of meaning, who sat the whole day
+long by the fire-side, waited on by his patient daughter. Sometimes,
+indeed, when Rachel Gray attended on her father with more than usual
+tenderness, when she lingered near his chair, looking wistfully in his
+face, or with timid and tender hand gently smoothed away his whitened
+hair from his rugged brow, sometimes, then, Mary looked and wondered, and
+felt vaguely moved, but she was too childish to know why.
+
+And, indeed, the story of Rachel's life at this time cannot be told. It
+was beautiful; but its beauty was not of earth, and to earthly glance
+cannot be revealed. It lay, a divine secret, between her heart and God.
+
+This peace was not destined to last Rachel and her father sat alone one
+morning in the parlour, when Mrs. Brown, who had found the street door
+ajar, burst in without preliminary warning. She was scarlet, and looked
+in a towering passion.
+
+"You audacious creatur," she screamed; "you audacious hussey, how dare
+you bring that man in this house--in my house! How dare you?"
+
+"He is my father," said Rachel, confounded, both at the accusation, and
+at the unexpected appearance of Mrs. Brown.
+
+The reply exasperated Mrs. Brown. She had never felt any extraordinary
+friendship or affection for her deceased cousin; but she had always
+entertained a very acute sense of her cousin's wrongs, and had
+accordingly honoured Thomas Gray with no small share of hatred and
+vituperation, and that Rachel should not feel as she did on the subject,
+or should presume to remember that the sinner was her father, was, in
+Mrs. Brown's eyes, an offence of the deepest dye. She gave her feelings
+free vent. She was a vulgar woman, and had a flow of vulgar eloquence at
+her command. She overwhelmed Rachel and Thomas Gray with sarcasm, scorn
+and abuse, and Rachel answered not one word, but heard her out, still as
+a statue, and pale as death. Mrs. Brown, too, was pale, but it was with
+wrath.
+
+"Do you know," she added, trembling from head to foot with that passion,
+"do you know that I could turn you out on the streets, you and your
+beggarly father--do you know that?"
+
+Rachel did know it, and groaned inwardly. Mrs. Brown saw her agony, and
+triumphed in the consciousness of her own power. But the very violence of
+her anger had by this time exhausted it; she felt much calmer, and took a
+more rational view of things.
+
+"I am a fool to mind what a simpleton like you does," observed Mrs.
+Brown, with that disregard of politeness which was one of her attributes;
+"for, being a simpleton, how can you but do the acts of a simpleton? As
+to bringing your father here, you must have been mad to think of it; for,
+if you can't support yourself, how can you support him? However, it's
+lucky I'm come in time to set all to rights. What's his parish?
+Marylebone, ain't it? I shall see the overseer this very day, and manage
+that for you; and it's just as well," added Mrs. Brown, divesting herself
+of bonnet and shawl, and proceeding to make herself at home, "that you
+didn't meddle, in it--a pretty mess you'd have made of it, I'll be
+bound. Well! and what do you stand dreaming there for? Make me a cup of
+tea--will you? I am just ready to drop with it all."
+
+As a proof of her assertion, she sank on the chair next her, took out her
+pocket-handkerchief, and began fanning herself. But, instead of complying
+with Mrs. Brown's orders, Rachel Gray stood before that lady motionless
+and pale. She looked her in the face steadily, and in a firm, clear
+voice, she deliberately said:
+
+"Mrs. Brown, my father shall never, whilst I live, go to a workhouse."
+
+"What!" screamed Mrs. Brown.
+
+"I say," repeated Rachel, "that my father shall never, whilst God gives
+his daughter life, go to a workhouse."
+
+Mrs. Brown was confounded--then she laughed derisively.
+
+"Nonsense, Rachel," she said, "nonsense. Why, I can turn you out, this
+very instant."
+
+But the threat fell harmless, Rachel was strong in that hour; her cheek
+had colour, her eye had light, her heart had courage. She looked at the
+helpless old man, who had drawn this storm on her head, then at Mrs.
+Brown, and calmly laying her hand on the shoulder of Thomas Gray, she
+again looked in Mrs. Brown's face, and silently smiled. Her choice was
+made--her resolve was taken.
+
+"Will you send him to the workhouse, or not?" imperatively cried Mrs.
+Brown.
+
+"No," deliberately replied Rachel.
+
+"Oh! very well, ma'am, very well," echoed Mrs. Brown, laughing bitterly;
+"please yourself--pray please yourself. So, that is my reward for saving
+you from beggary, is it? Very well, ma'am; you and your father may pack
+off together--that's all."
+
+"Be it so," rather solemnly replied Rachel, "be it so. What I leave in
+this house will, I trust, cancel the debt I owe you. Father," she added,
+stooping towards him, "lean on my shoulder, and get up. We must go."
+
+With apathy Thomas Gray had heard all that had passed, and with apathy,
+he trembling rose, and complied with Rachel's intimation, and looking in
+her face, he uttered his usual childish: "Never mind."
+
+But before they reached the door, Mrs. Brown, to the surprise and dismay
+of Rachel, went into violent hysterics. She was an over-bearing and
+ill-tempered woman, but her heart was not wholly unkind; and on seeing
+that Rachel so readily took her at her word, she was overwhelmed with
+mingled rage and shame. Hastily making her father sit down on the nearest
+chair, Rachel ran to Mrs. Brown's assistance. A fit of weeping and bitter
+reproaches followed the hysterics; and Rachel was convicted of being the
+most ungrateful creature on the face of the earth. In vain Rachel
+attempted a justification; Mrs. Brown drowned her in a torrent of speech,
+and remained the most injured of women.
+
+The scene ended as such scenes ever end. There was a compromise; the
+victim made every concession, and the triumphant tyrant gained more than
+her point. In short, that her father might not want the shelter of a
+roof, Rachel agreed to remain in the house, and Mrs. Brown kindly agreed
+to come and live in it, and use Rachel as her servant and domestic slave,
+by which Mrs. Brown, besides keeping her firm hold on Rachel--no slight
+consideration with one who loved power beyond everything else--effected
+a considerable saving in her income.
+
+"Oh! my father--my father!" thought Rachel, as she bent over his chair
+that night, and tears, which he felt not, dropped on his gray hair,
+"little do you know what I shall have to bear for your sake."
+
+She did not speak aloud, yet he seemed vaguely conscious that something
+lay on her mind; for he shook his head, and uttered his eternal "Never
+mind--never mind!"
+
+"And I will not mind--so help me God!" fervently answered Rachel aloud.
+
+And she did not mind; but, alas! what now was her fate? Ask it not. She
+had made her sacrifice in the spirit of utter abnegation, and none need
+count the cost which she never reckoned.
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+
+The same cloud of trouble and sorrow that now darkened the daily life of
+Rachel Gray, soon gathered over her neighbours and friends. With boding
+and pain, she watched the coming of a calamity, to them still invisible.
+
+Mr. Jones got up one morning, and felt exactly as usual. He took down his
+shutters, and no presentiment warned him of the sight that was going to
+greet his eyes.
+
+The Teapot stood at the corner of a street which had naturally another
+corner facing it; that corner--let it be angle, if you like, critical
+reader--had, from time immemorial, been in the possession of a brown,
+tottering, untenanted house, whose broken parlour windows Mr. Jones had
+always seen filled with, blank oak shutters, strong enough for security
+and closing within.
+
+But now, to his dismay, he saw half-a-dozen workmen pulling down the
+bottom of the house, and leaving the top untouched. His heart gave a
+great thump in his bosom. "I'm a lost man," he thought, "they're making a
+shop of it."
+
+And so they were, but what sort of a shop was it to be? That was the
+question. Jones lost no time; he put down his shutter, thrust his hands
+in his pocket--his usual resource when he wanted to look unconcerned--
+sauntered awhile down the street, talked to some children, and finally
+came back to the workmen.
+
+"Pulling it down," he said, after looking at them for awhile, "an old
+rubbishing concern--ain't it?"
+
+"Pulling it down!" echoed one of the workmen, giving him a contemptuous
+look, "much you know about it."
+
+"Well, but what is it to be?" asked Jones, looking as simple as he could,
+"stables?"
+
+"Stables! a shop, stupid!"
+
+"Oh! a shop! Ah! it's to be a shop, is it? And what sort of a shop--
+public-house? We want one."
+
+"Better ask Mr. Smithson; the house is his."
+
+"Oh! it's Mr. Smithson's, is it?"
+
+Jones walked away much relieved.
+
+Mr. Smithson had long talked of removing himself and his earthenware to
+some larger tenement than that which he now occupied; a pleasant
+neighbour he was not; but anything was better than the fear which had for
+a moment seized the heart of Richard Jones.
+
+The workmen did not linger over their task, indeed, Mr. Smithson took
+care that they should not. Night and morning, the whole day long, Jones
+saw him after them; he watched him through the pots of Scotch marmelade
+that decorated the front of his shop window, and internally admired the
+indefatigable zeal Mr. Smithson displayed. Humbly, too, he contrasted it
+with his own deficiencies in that respect "I ain't got no spirit; that's
+the fact of it," confessed Mr. Jones in his own heart.
+
+In a comparatively short space of time, the bricklayers had done their
+task; they were succeeded by the carpenters, who proved as zealous and as
+active. And now fear and trembling once more seized the heart of Richard
+Jones. What were those busy carpenters about? why were they fabricating
+shelves and drawers? drawers of every size, some small, some large, just
+such drawers as he had in his shop? He questioned one of their body: what
+was to be sold in that shop--did he know? The man could not tell, but
+rather fancied it was to be an oil and colour shop. Then it was not to be
+Mr. Smithson's own? Oh, no, certainly!
+
+Jones walked away, a prey to the most tormenting anxiety. Was the man
+right--was he wrong? had he spoken the truth? had he deceived him? Was
+he, Jones, now that his business was really improving, was he threatened
+with a rival? Or was this but a false alarm, the phantom of his fears?
+what would he not have given to think so! His ease was the more
+distressing, that he dared unburthen his mind to none, to Mary least of
+any. She, poor little thing, far from sharing her father's fears,
+rejoiced in the prospect of a new shop.
+
+"It'll make the street quite gay," she said to her father, "especially if
+it's a linen-draper's. I wonder if they'll have pretty bonnets."
+
+She tried to obtain information on this interesting point, but failed
+completely. Suspense is worse than the worst reality. Richard Jones lost
+appetite and sleep. Slumber, when it came, was accompanied by such
+fearful nightmare, that waking thoughts, though bitter, were not, at
+least, so terrible. He could not forget the opposite shop; in the first
+place, because he saw it every morning with his bodily eyes; in the
+second, because it ever haunted that inward eye called by Wordsworth 'the
+bliss of solitude.' How far it proved a bliss to Richard Jones, the
+reader may imagine.
+
+All this time the shop had been progressing, and now bricklayer,
+carpenter, glazier, and decorator haying done their work, it was
+completed and ready for its tenant, who, however, seemed in no hurry to
+appear. This proved the worst time for Richard Jones. To look at that
+shop all the day long, and not to be able to make anything of it; to
+wonder whether it were a friend or an enemy; whether it would give new
+lustre to the street on which he had cast his fortunes, or blast those
+fortunes in their very birth, was surely no ordinary trial. Well might he
+grow thin, haggard, and worn.
+
+At length, the crisis came. At the close of November, a dread rumour
+reached his ears. The shop was to be a grocer's shop, and it was to open
+a week before Christmas.
+
+That same evening, Mary came home crying, and much agitated. Mrs. Brown,
+with her usual kindness, had given information.
+
+"Oh, father!" she exclaimed, "Mrs. Brown says it's to be a grocer's
+shop."
+
+"So I have heard to-day," he replied, a little gloomily. "Never mind,
+child," he added, attempting to cheer up, and a rueful attempt it turned
+out, "never mind, I dare-say there's room for two."
+
+He said it, but he knew it was not true; he knew there was room but for
+one, and that if two came, why, either both must perish after a fierce
+contest, or one survive and triumph over the ruin of the other's all. He
+knew it, and groaned at the thought.
+
+"I wish you wouldn't father," said Mary, again beginning to cry.
+
+"Mary, my pet, I can't help it," said Jones, fairly giving way to
+feelings too long repressed; "there aint room for two, that's the plain
+truth of it, and if another grocer comes, why, he must ruin me, or I must
+ruin him; and that aint pleasant to think of, is it?"
+
+Mary was not without spirit.
+
+"Father," she cried resolutely, "if it's to be, why, it's to be, and it
+can't be helped; but I wouldn't give in without trying to get the upper
+hand, that I wouldn't."
+
+Her father shook his head disconsolately.
+
+"Child," he said, "it's like setting an old horse against a mettlesome
+young one. That new fellow has got every advantage. Look at his shop,
+then look at mine; why, his is twice as big again. Look at his front--
+all plate glass; look at his counters--all polished oak!"
+
+"Well, and can't you get the shop--our shop--done up too?" ambitiously
+asked Mary. "There's time yet."
+
+"Why yes, there is--but the money, Mary dear!"
+
+"Never mind the money."
+
+"No more I would, my pet, if I had got it; but you see, the one pound ten
+a week hasn't kept up; and those things cost a precious deal."
+
+Mary reflected a while. "S'pose," she suggested, "you got in a fresh
+stock of jams in glass jars, for the front window."
+
+"And what shall we do with the old?"
+
+"Eat them. And s'pose you add a few pots of pickles?"
+
+"Pickles!" echoed Jones, looking doubtful.
+
+"And s'pose," continued Mary, "you add macaroni, and sauces, and set up
+as a superior grocer."
+
+Jones scratched his head.
+
+"Law, child!" he said, "this aint a stylish neighbourhood--and who'll
+buy my macaroni and my sauces?"
+
+"Why no one, of course," superciliously replied Mary. "It's not to sell
+them, you want them; it's for the look of the thing--to be a superior
+grocer, you know."
+
+The words "superior grocer," gently tickled secret ambition. Mr. Richard
+Jones seriously promised his daughter to think about it.
+
+Mary had other thoughts, which she did not communicate to her father; and
+of these thoughts, the chief was to find out what had become of Mr.
+Saunders, and return to the old plan of enticing him into partnership.
+She was so full of this project, that, partly to get assistance, partly
+to take a little consequence on herself, she imparted it, under the
+strictest secrecy, to Rachel Gray; and at the close, she pretty clearly
+hinted, that if Mr. Joseph Saunders behaved well, he might, in time,
+aspire to the honour of her hand.
+
+Rachel heard her silently, and looked very uncomfortable.
+
+"My dear," she said, hesitatingly, "you must not think of anything of the
+kind; indeed you must not."
+
+"And why shouldn't I?" tartly asked Mary, with a saucy toss of the head.
+
+"Because, my dear," said Rachel, gently and sadly, "Jane is going to
+marry that Mr. Saunders, who ifs cousin to Mr. Smithson, who is putting
+him in the new grocer's shop."
+
+For a moment, Mary remained stunned; then she burst into tears.
+
+"He's a mean, sneaking fellow! that's what he is!" she cried.
+
+"Oh, my dear--my dear!" gently said Rachel, "will you not take something
+from the hand of God! We have all our lot to bear," she added, with a
+half sigh.
+
+But gently though Rachel spoke, Mary looked more rebellious than
+submissive.
+
+"He's a mean--" she began again; the entrance of Mrs. Brown interrupted
+her.
+
+Mrs. Brown was in a very ill humour. At first, she had behaved pretty
+decently to Rachel and her father; but of late, she had given free vent
+to her natural disposition; and it was not, we have no need to say, an
+amiable one. On the present occasion, she had, moreover, additional cause
+for dissatisfaction.
+
+"And so," she exclaimed, slamming the door, and irefully addressing
+Rachel, "and so your beggarly father has been and broke my china cup! Eh,
+ma'am!"
+
+Rachel turned pale, on hearing of this new disaster.
+
+"Indeed, Mrs. Brown--" she began.
+
+"Don't Mrs. Brown me," was the indignant rejoinder. "I tell you, I have
+never had a moment's peace, ease, and quiet, and never shall have--since
+you and your beggarly father entered this house."
+
+For, by a strange perversion of ideas, Mrs. Brown persisted in asserting
+and thinking that it was Rachel and her father who had entered the house,
+and not she. And this, Rachel might have said; and she might have added
+that to bear daily reproaches and insults, formed no part of her
+agreement with Mrs. Brown. She might--but where would the use have been?
+She was free to depart any day she liked; and since she preferred to
+stay, why not bear it all patiently? And so she remained silent, whilst
+Mrs. Brown scolded and railed; for, as she had said to Mary, "we have all
+our lot to bear."
+
+The lesson was lost on the young girl. No sooner was Mrs. Brown's back
+turned, than again Mary abused Mr. Saunders, Jane, Mr. Smithson and the
+new shop collectively, until she could go home to her father's. He
+already knew all, and gloomily exclaimed, "that it was no more than he
+expected; that it was all of a piece; and that there was neither honesty,
+gratitude, nor goodness left in this wicked world."
+
+From which comprehensive remark we can clearly see that Mr. Jones is
+turning misanthropic. And yet the matter was very simple--an everyday
+occurrence. Smithson had seen that he might find it profitable to cut the
+ground under Jones's feet. Why should he not do it? Is not profit the
+abject of commerce? and is not competition the fairest way of securing
+profit?
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI.
+
+
+The reader may easily imagine Jane and Joseph Saunders married. It was an
+old engagement Imagine them, too, retained from their wedding tour to
+Gravesend. It is evening; and on the next morning, "The two Teapots" is
+to open.
+
+Richard Jones spent a sleepless night, and took down his shutters as soon
+as a gray, dull light entered the street. It availed little; only a dirty
+child came in for a pennyworth of brown sugar. It was half-past eight
+when Saunders opened his shop; and just about that time a chill,
+drizzling rain began to fall.
+
+The morning was miserable, and only a few wretched figures flitted about
+the wet street. No one entered the "Teapot;" but then not a soul either
+crossed the threshold of the rival shop.
+
+And thus the dull morning wore on until the church clock struck ten. A
+sprinkling of customers then entered the shop of Richard Jones. They were
+one and all mightily indignant at the impudence of the opposite shop in
+coming there--a lady in a large, black, shabby straw bonnet in
+particular.
+
+"Ay, ay, you may flare away--you may flare away," she added, knowingly
+wagging her head at it, "you'll have none of my custom, I can tell you.
+An ounce of your four shilling best, Mr. Jones, if you please?"
+
+"Coming, ma'am, di-rectly," was the prompt reply. .
+
+"I never heard anythink like it--never," observed another lady, with
+solemn indignation. "Did the low fellow think we wanted his shop!"
+
+An indignant "no," was chorused around.
+
+Richard Jones's heart swelled, and his throat too. He was much moved.
+
+"Gentlemen," he began, "no, ladies, I mean--ladies, I have always done
+my duty since I was a boy, and, with the help of God, I mean to do my
+duty till I die." Pause and approving murmur. "And, ladies, I am no
+speech-maker--all I say is this: God forgive that villain opposite! You
+know the story. I'll not trouble you with repeating it. All I say is
+this: ladies, if my customers'll stand by me, I'll stand by my customers
+--I'll stand by my customers!" he repeated, looking round the shop with a
+triumphant eye, and giving the counter a hearty thump with his fist; and,
+poor fellow, you may be sure that he did mean to stand by his customers.
+
+The oration proved very successful; altogether, the day was successful.
+The two Teapots remained vacant; the Teapot was thronged. All Jones's
+liege subjects were anxious to prove their loyalty; and though, when the
+gas was lit, Jones could discern a few dark figures within his rival's
+shop, Jones did not care. He felt certain they were but some of the low
+creatures from the alley, and be did not care.
+
+The second day resembled the first, and the third resembled the second.
+Jones felt quite satisfied "that it was all right," until he cast up his
+accounts at the end of the week. To his surprise, he found that his
+expenditure was barely covered, and that, somehow or other, his gains had
+considerably lessened. He reckoned over and over, and still he came to
+the same result. "Well, 'taint of much consequence for one week," he
+thought, a little impatiently, and he put the books by.
+
+"What's the matter, father?" asked Mary, looking up into his overcast
+face.
+
+"What's the matter!" he echoed cheerfully; "why, the matter is, that you
+are a saucy puss--that's what's the matter," and he chucked her chin,
+and Mary laughed.
+
+But the next week's examination revealed a still deeper gap. Jones
+scratched his head, and pulled a long face. It was not that he minded the
+loss, for it was a trifling one after all; but be had a secret dread, and
+it stood in the background of his thoughts, like a ghost in a dark room,
+haunting him. Could it be--was it possible--that his customers were
+playing him false--that they were deserting him--and he began to think
+and think, and to remember, how many pennyworths of this, and of that, he
+had sold to the children, and how few shillings worth he had sold to the
+mothers.
+
+"Well, father, and how's this week?" asked Mary.
+
+Jones rubbed his chin, and looked at her fairly perplexed--his wit was
+none of the brightest--as to how he might best elude the question.
+
+"How's this week," he echoed; "well, this week is like last week to be
+sure. I wonder how that fellow Saunders is a getting on."
+
+"Law! father, don't mind him," said Mary. "He's low, that's what he is--
+he's low."
+
+Impossible for us to translate the scorn with which Miss Mary Jones
+spoke. It impressed her father. "Spirited little thing," he thought, and
+he drew her fondly towards him, and kissed her, and Mary fortunately
+forgot her question.
+
+Week after week passed, and what had been a speck on the horizon, became
+a dark and threatening cloud. Richard Jones could not shut his eyes to
+the truth that his customers were deserting him. Even Mary perceived it,
+and spoke uneasily on the subject, of which her father at once made
+light.
+
+"It's business, child," he said, "and business is all ups and downs; I
+have had the ups, and the downs I must have." Spite this philosophic
+reflection, Mr. Jones could not help thinking he had rather more than his
+share of the downs. He was embittered, too, by daily perceiving the
+defection of some staunch customer. That lady in the large, shabby, black
+straw bonnet, who had so spiritedly told "The two Teapots" to flare away
+on the day of its opening, was one of the first who forsook the "Teapot"
+for its rival. Many followed her perfidious example; but Mr. Jones did
+not feel fairly cut up, until he one evening distinctly saw Rachel Gray
+walk out of the opposite shop. The stab of Brutus was nothing to Caesar
+in comparison with this blow to Richard Jones.
+
+And he was thinking it over the next morning, and stood behind his
+counter breaking sugar rather gloomily, when Rachel herself appeared. Mr.
+Jones received her very coldly.
+
+She asked for a pound of sugar.
+
+"And no tea?" he said, pointedly.
+
+"None to-day," quietly replied Rachel; but she saw that he knew all, and
+she was too sincere to feign ignorance. "Mr. Jones," she said, somewhat
+sadly, "I must go where I am told, and do as I am bid; but, indeed, why
+do you not keep better tea?"
+
+"Better tea! better tea!" echoed Mr. Jones, in some indignation.
+
+"Yes," quietly said Rachel, "better tea."
+
+Mr. Jones smiled an injured smile, and rather sarcastically replied:
+
+"Miss Gray, if you prefer that feller's tea to mine, you're welcome to
+leave your money to him, and not to me. 'Tain't because my daughter is
+prenticed to you that I expect nothink from you, Miss. All I say is this:
+don't go there at night, Miss Gray, and buy your tea, and then come here
+in the morning and buy your sugar. That's not giving a man your custom,
+you know it ain't. Don't do it; no offence meant, but I'm like you, Miss
+Gray, plain spoken, you see."
+
+And he resumed the breaking of his sugar.
+
+"I prefer!" sadly said Rachel, "when you know, Mr. Jones, that I am no
+one now, but must go by the will of another--indeed, you wrong me!"
+
+Jones knew he did; but misfortune makes men wilfully unjust.
+
+"Don't mention it," he interrupted, "ladies like new faces, and he's a
+young fellow, and I am an old one, and so there's an end of it."
+
+Poor Rachel looked much pained. To be blamed by every one seemed her lot.
+
+"Indeed, Mr. Jones," she said, "I must do as Mrs. Brown bids me, and she
+says your four shilling black is not equal to his four, and, indeed, Mr.
+Jones, I am sorry to say, that others say so too."
+
+Mr. Jones did not reply one word; he fell into a brown study; at the
+close of it he sighed, and looking up, said earnestly:
+
+"Miss Gray, let me have some of that tea, will you? and I'll see myself
+what it's like."
+
+"Of course you will," said Rachel, brightening, "you shall have it
+directly--directly, Mr. Jones."
+
+And without loss of time she hastened home, and almost immediately
+appeared again, bringing him the tea herself, and earnestly declaring
+that she was sure he had only to taste it, to set all right, to which
+Jones answered not a word, but rather gloomily thanked her for the
+trouble she had taken. When he was once more alone, he smelt the tea,
+shook his head and frowned; then he put it away until evening came round,
+when he gave it to Mary, and without further explanation, simply told her
+that was the tea they were going to have this evening. Unconscious Mary
+made the tea.
+
+"La! Father," she exclaimed, as she poured the boiling water upon it,
+"what beautiful tea you've got; it's quite fragrant."
+
+"Is it?" he echoed, faintly,
+
+"Why, of course it is," she said, pettishly, "I am sure that fellow
+opposite ain't got nothink like it."
+
+Richard Jones leaned his brow on his hand, and checked a groan. But when
+the tea was drawn, when it was poured out, when he raised the cup to his
+lips and tasted it, the man's courage forsook him; he put down the cup,
+and cried like a child.
+
+"Father! father!" exclaimed Mary, frightened and bewildered.
+
+"Oh! my darling!" he cried, "we're ruined--we're lost!--that tea is
+Joseph Saunders's tea; and he gives it for four shillings, and it's
+better than my five. And I can't give it, nor I can't get it neither," he
+added, despairingly; "for I have not got credit, and little cash; and I
+buy dear, and dear I must sell, or starve!"
+
+Of this speech, all Mary understood, was that the tea she had been making
+was tea from Mr. Saunders's shop. She deliberately rose, poured the
+contents of the teapot on the ashes in the hearth; the contents of her
+own teacup, then of her father's quickly followed; then she sat down,
+folded her arms, and uttered a grim: "There! I only wish I could serve
+him so," she added after a pause.
+
+But what Mary meant by this wish--to pour out Joseph Saunders like his
+own tea, seems rather a fantastic image, even for hate--the present
+writer does not venture to determine.
+
+"It's all over!" sadly said Jones; "we can't compete with him. I'll shut
+up shop, and we'll go to some other neighbourhood, and live in our old
+way. After all, I'll not be a richer nor a poorer man than before my
+cousin left me the sixty pound."
+
+"You ain't got no spirit!" cried Mary, turning scarlet with anger. "Give
+in to that fellow!--I'd have more spirit than that," she added with
+mighty scorn.
+
+Her father attempted to remonstrate; but the wilful little thing would
+not listen to facts or to reason. She was sure Saunders could not keep up
+much longer--that she was. They had only to wait, and wear him out.
+
+Alas! it is very hard to tear out ambition and pride from the heart of
+man, rich or poor. In an evil hour, Richard Jones yielded.
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII.
+
+
+And now, alas! fairly began the Teapot's downward course. Every effort of
+Richard Jones to rise, only made him sink the deeper. To use a worn out,
+though expressive phrase, he stirred heaven and earth to get better tea;
+but the spell to conjure it forth was wanting. Jones had very correctly
+stated the case to his daughter--he had not credit; he had little or no
+cash; what he purchased in small quantities, he bought dear; and he sold
+as he bought. And thus, unable to compete with superior, capital and
+energy, he declined day by day.
+
+But if he fell, it was not without a struggle. He turned desperate, and
+resorted to a desperate expedient; he sold his goods at prime cost, and
+left himself without profit. But Jones did not care; all he wanted was to
+crush his opponent--that object accomplished, and he once more sole
+master of the field, he could make his own price, and gradually retrieve
+lost time, and heal the wounds received in the battle.
+
+Business requires a cool head; competition has its limits, beyond which
+yawns the bottomless pit of ruin. Jones lost his temper, and with it his
+judgment. Not satisfied with the faint change for the better, produced by
+the first measure, he impatiently resolved "to settle that Saunders," by
+a second and still bolder stroke. He filled his shop-windows with
+placards, on which prices were marked, with notes of admiration. He
+pressed into his service a dozen of little boys, whose sole business was
+to slip bills under doors, and to throw them down areas, or to force them
+into the hands of unconscious passengers; and he crowned an these arts by
+selling under prime cost.
+
+The customers could not resist this tender appeal to their feelings; they
+came back one and all--the Teapot once more was full--the two Teapots
+was deserted; and Richard Jones was triumphant.
+
+We profess no particular regard for Joseph Saunders; but we cannot deny
+that he played his cruel game skilfully and well. He did not bring down
+his prices one farthing. Without emotion he saw his shop forsaken--he
+knew his own strength; he knew, too, the weakness of his enemy.
+
+"Oh! It's that dodge you are after," he thought, thrusting his tongue in
+his cheek. "Well, then, it has beggared many a man before you; and we
+shall see how long you'll keep it up--that's all."
+
+And to whosoever liked to hear, Saunders declared that Mr. Jones was
+selling at loss, and that he (Saunders) could not afford to do so; and
+was sorry the old man would be so obstinate. "Where was the use, when he
+could not go on?"
+
+Nothing did Jones more harm than this assertion, and the knowledge that
+it was a literal truth; for though people worship cheapness, that goddess
+of modern commerce, it is only on condition that she shall be a reality,
+not a fiction; that she shall rest on the solid basis of gains, howsoever
+small; not on the sand foundation of loss, that certain forerunner of
+failure. Jones could not, of course, long keep up the plan of selling
+under cost; he was obliged to give it up. With it, ceased his fallacious
+and momentary prosperity.
+
+"I thought so," soliloquized Saunders.
+
+Reader, if you think that we mean to cast a stone at the great shop, you
+are mistaken. We deal not with pitiless political economy, with its laws,
+with their workings. The great shop must prosper; 'tis in the nature of
+things; and the little shop must perish--'tis in their nature too. We
+but lament this sad truth, that on God's earth, which God made for all,
+there should be so little room for the poor man; for his pride, his
+ambition, his desires, which he has in common with the rich man; we but
+deplore what all, alas! know too well; that the crown of creation, a
+soul, a man by God's Almighty mind, fashioned and called forth into
+being, by Christ's priceless blood purchased and redeemed to Heaven,
+should be a thing of so little worth--ay, so much, so very much less
+worth than some money, in this strange world of ours.
+
+Few pitied Richard Jones in his fall. His little ambition was remembered
+as a crime; for success had not crowned it. His little vanities were so
+many deadly sins; for gold did not hide or excuse them. To the dregs, the
+unhappy man drank the latter draught which rises to the lips of the
+fallen, when they see the world deserting them to worship a rival. A
+usurper had invaded his narrow realm, and crushed him; his little story
+was a true page from that great book of History, which we need not read
+to know how power decays, or to learn of man's fickleness, and fortune's
+frowns. Alas! History, if we did but know it, lies around us, as mankind
+lives in the meanest wretch we meet, and perchance despise.
+
+It is a bitter thing to behold our own ruin; it is a cruel thing to look
+on powerless and despairing; and both now fell to the lot of Richard
+Jones. He had ventured all, and lost all. He was doomed--he knew it;
+every one knew it. But, alas! the cup of his woes was not full.
+
+Mary had always been delicate. One chill evening she took cold; a cough
+settled on her chest; sometimes it seemed gone, then suddenly it returned
+again. "She felt very well," she said; and, strange to say, her father
+thought so too. Rachel was the first to see that something was wrong.
+
+"Mary," she said to her, one morning, "what ails you? Your breath seems
+quite short."
+
+"La! bless you, Miss," replied Mary, in her patronizing way, "I am all
+right."
+
+They were alone; Rachel looked at the young girl; her eyes glittered; her
+cheeks were red with a hectic flush; her breathing was quick and
+oppressive. The eyes of Rachel filled with tears; she thought of her
+little dead sister in her grave.
+
+"Mary," she said, "do not work any more to-day--go home."
+
+Mary looked up in her face, and laughed--the gay laugh of an unconscious
+child, fearless of death.
+
+"Why, Miss, you are crying!" she exclaimed, amazed.
+
+"Am I?" said Rachel, trying to smile, "never mind, Mary; go home--or,
+rather, take this parcel to Mrs. Jameson, number three, Albert Terrace.
+It is a fine day--the walk will do you good."
+
+Mary jumped up, charmed at the prospect. She tied her bonnet-strings
+before the looking-glass, and hummed the tune of "Meet me by moonlight
+alone." Mary was turned sixteen; and vague ideas of romance sometimes
+fitted through her young brain.
+
+When she was fairly gone, Rachel rose, laid her work by, put on her
+bonnet and shawl, and quietly slipped round to the Teapot: ostensibly,
+she wanted to buy some tea: her real purpose was to call the attention of
+Mr. Jones to his daughter's state.
+
+But, strange to say, Rachel Gray could not make him understand her; his
+mind was full of the two Teapots; of the villany of that Saunders; of the
+world's ingratitude; of his misfortunes and his wrongs.
+
+"I dare say Mary feels it too," put in Rachel.
+
+"Of course she does, Miss Gray--of course she does. The child has
+feelings. And then you know, Miss Gray, if that fellow hadn't a come
+there, why, you know, we were getting on as well as could be."
+
+"I notice that she coughs," said Rachel
+
+"Why, yes, poor child; she can't get rid of that cough--she's growing,
+you see. And then, you see, that Saunders--"
+
+"And her breathing is so short," interrupted Rachel.
+
+"Sure to be, on account of the cough. And, as I was saying, that
+Saunders--"
+
+"But, Mr. Jones, don't you think you had better see a doctor?" again
+interrupted Rachel.
+
+"See a doctor!" exclaimed Jones, staring at her. "You don't mean to say
+my child is ill, Miss Gray?"
+
+"I don't think she is quite well, Mr. Jones," replied Rachel, trembling
+as she said so.
+
+He sank down on his seat behind the counter, pale as death. The obstinate
+cough, the short breathing, the hectic flush, all rushed back to his
+memory; unseen, unheeded, till then, they now told him one fearful story.
+With trembling hand he wiped away the drops of cold perspiration from his
+forehead.
+
+"The doctor must see her directly," he said, "directly. I'll go and look
+for him, and you'll send her round. It's nothing--nothing at all, I am
+sure; she's growing, you see. But still, it must be attended to, you know
+--it must be attended to."
+
+A light laugh at the door interrupted him. He turned round, and saw Mary
+looking in at him and Rachel Gray, through the glass windows; with
+another laugh, she vanished. Rachel went to the door, and called her
+back.
+
+"Mary, Mary, your father wants you."
+
+The young girl came in; and, for the first time, her father seemed to see
+the bright red spot that burned on her cheek, the unnatural brilliancy of
+her blue eyes, the painful shortness of her breath. A mist seemed to fall
+from his eyes, and the dread truth to stand revealed before him; but he
+did not speak, nor did Rachel; Mary looked at them both, wondering.
+
+"Well, what ails you two, that you stare at me so," she said, pertly. "I
+am so hot," she added, after a while. "I think I shall stay at home, as
+you said. Miss Gray."
+
+She went into the back parlour, and sat down on the first chair she found
+at hand. Rachel Gray and her father followed her in. The poor child, who,
+because she had felt no actual pain, had thought that she could not be
+ill, now, for the first time, felt that she was so.
+
+"What ails you, dear?" softly asked Rachel, bending over her, as she saw
+her gradually turning pale.
+
+"La! bless you. Miss Gray, I am quite well--only I feel so faint like."
+
+And even as she spoke, her head sank on the bosom of Rachel--she had
+fainted.
+
+When Mary recovered to consciousness, she was lying on her bed, up
+stairs. Rachel stood by her pillow. At the foot of her bed, Mary caught
+sight of her father's face, ghastly pale. Between the two, she saw a
+strange gentleman, a doctor, who felt her pulse, put a few questions to
+her, wrote a prescription, and soon left.
+
+"I must go now," said Rachel, "but I shall come back this evening, and
+bring my work."
+
+Jones did not heed her; he looked stupified and like one bereft of sense,
+but Mary laughed and replied, "Oh! do Miss Gray, come and take tea with
+us."
+
+Rachel promised that she would try, kissed her and left. With great
+difficulty she obtained from Mrs. Brown the permission to return.
+
+They on whom the light of this world shone not, were rarely in the favour
+of Mrs. Brown. And only on condition of being home early did she allow
+Rachel to depart. Before leaving, she went up to her other's chair, he
+was not now quite so helpless as at first, and did not require her
+constant presence or assistance; though he still did not know her.
+
+"I shall try and not be too long away," said Rachel in a low voice.
+
+"Never mind," he muttered, shaking his head, "never mind."
+
+"There's a precious old fool for you!" said Mrs. Brown laughing coarsely.
+
+A flush of pain crossed Rachel's cheek, but to have replied, would have
+been to draw down a storm on her head; she silently left the house.
+
+She found Mary feverish, restless, and full of projects. She would get up
+early the next day, and make up for lost time. She remembered all the
+work she had to do, and which she had unaccountably neglected. Her
+father's shirts to mend, her own wardrobe to see to; the next room to
+clean up, for a second lodger had never been found; in short, to hear
+her, it seemed as if her life had only begun, and that this was the day
+of its opening. In vain Rachel tried to check her soothingly; Mary talked
+on and was so animated and so merry, that her father, who came up every
+five minutes to see how she was, could not believe her to be so very ill
+as Miss Gray thought, or the Doctor had hinted. Indeed, when at nine
+Rachel left, and he let her down stairs, he seemed quite relieved.
+
+"The child's only growing," he said to Rachel, "only growing; a little
+rest and a little medicine, and she'll be all right again."
+
+But scarcely was Rachel out of the door, when she burst into tears. "My
+poor little Mary," she thought, "my poor little Mary!"
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII.
+
+
+It was rather late when Rachel knocked timidly at the door, Mrs. Brown
+opened to her, and there was a storm on her brow.
+
+"Well, ma'am," she began; "well, ma'am!"
+
+"Oh! pray do not--do not!" imploringly exclaimed Rachel, clasping her
+hands.
+
+For her excessive patience had of late rendered Mrs. Brown's violent
+temper wholly ungovernable. Irritated by the very meekness which met her
+wrath, she had, with the instinct of aggression, found the only
+vulnerable point of Rachel--her father. This was, indeed, the heel of
+Achilles. All the shafts of the enemy's railing that fell harmless on the
+childish old man, rebounded on his daughter with double force: deep and
+keen they sank in her hearty and every one inflicted its wound. And thus
+it was that Rachel had learned to look with terror to Mrs. Brown's wrath
+--that she now shrank from it with fear and trembling, and implored for
+mercy.
+
+But there is no arguing with ill-temper. Mrs. Brown would neither give
+mercy, nor hear reason. Had she not lent twenty pound three and six to
+Rachel? Was not Rachel beholden to her for food, shelter, chemist's bill,
+and physician's fees? and should not, therefore, her will be Rachel's
+law, and her pleasure be Rachel's pleasure?
+
+Poor Rachel, her patience was great, but now she felt as if it must fail;
+as if she could not, even for the sake of a roof's shelter, endure more
+from one to whom no tie of love or regard bound her--nothing but the
+burdening sense of an obligation which she had not sought, and for which
+she had already paid so dearly. She clasped her thin hands--she looked
+with her mild brown eyes in the face of her tormentor, and her lips
+quivered with the intensity of the feelings that moved her to reply, and
+repel insult and contumely, and with the strength of will that kept her
+silent.
+
+At length, Mrs. Brown grew tired, for her ill-temper had this quality--
+it was vehement, not slow and irritating, the infliction ceased--Rachel
+remained alone.
+
+Mrs. Brown had taken possession of the room that had once been Rachel's.
+Thomas Gray slept in the back parlour; and in order to remain within
+reach of aid, Rachel slept on the floor of the front room. In this room
+it was that Mrs. Brown had left her. Softly Rachel went and opened the
+door of her father's room; it was dark and quiet; but in its stillness,
+she heard his regular breathing--he slept, and little, did he know how
+much that calm sleep of his cost his daughter. She closed the door, and
+sat down in her own room; but she thought not of sleep; the tempter was
+with her in that hour. Her heart was full of bitterness--full even to
+overflowing. On a dark and dreary sea, her lot seemed cast; she saw not
+the guiding star of faith over her head. She saw not before her the haven
+of blessed peace.
+
+The words "Thy will be done," fell from her lips; they were not in her
+heart. Nothing was there, nothing but wounded pride, resentment, and the
+sense of unmerited wrong.
+
+In vain, thinking of her tyrant, Rachel said to herself, "I forgive that
+woman--I forgive her freely." She felt that she did not; that anger
+against this pitiless tormentor of her life smouldered in her heart like
+the red coal living beneath pale ashes; and Rachel was startled, and
+justly, to feel that so strange and unusual an emotion, anger against
+another, had found place in her bosom, and that though she bade it go, it
+stayed, and would not depart.
+
+To be gentle is not to be passionless. The spirit of Rachel had been
+early subdued, too much subdued for her happiness; but it was too noble
+ever to have been quenched. It still burned within her, a flame pure and
+free, though invisible. But now, alas! the vapours of earthly passion
+dimmed its brightness: and it was darkened with human wrath.
+
+Through such moments of temptation and trial all have passed; and then it
+is, indeed, when we are not blinded by pride, that we feel our miserable
+weakness, a weakness for which there is but one remedy, but then it is a
+divine one--the strength of God.
+
+That strength Rachel now invoked. _De Profundis_, from the depths of her
+sorrow she cried out to the Lord, not that her burden might grow less,
+but that her strength to bear it, to endure and forgive, might increase
+eyen with it And strength was granted unto her. It came, not at once, not
+like the living waters that flowed from the arid rock, when the prophet
+spoke, but slowly, like the heavenly manna that fell softly in the
+silence of the night, and was gathered ere the sun rose above the desert.
+
+Rachel felt--oh, pure and blessed feeling!--that her heart was free
+from bitterness and gall; that she could forgive the offender, to seventy
+times seven; that she could pray for her--not with the lip-prayer of the
+self-righteous Pharisee, but with the heartfelt orisons of the poor,
+sinning, and penitent publican; and again and again, and until the tears
+flowed down her cheek, she blessed God, the sole Giver of so mighty and
+superhuman a grace.
+
+And well it was for Rachel Gray, that she forgave her enemy that night.
+Well it was, indeed, that the next sun beheld not her wrath. Before that
+sun rose, the poor, erring woman had given in her account of every deed,
+and every word uttered in the heat of anger:--Mrs. Brown had gone to her
+room strong and well. She was found dead and cold in her bed the next
+morning.
+
+A coroner's inquest was held, and a verdict of "sudden death" recorded.
+And a will, too, was found in a tea-caddy, by which Mrs. Brown formally
+bequeathed all her property to Rachel Gray, "as a proof," said the will,
+"of her admiration and respect."
+
+On hearing the words, Rachel burst into tears.
+
+"Thank God! That I forgave her!" she exclaimed, "thank God!"
+
+Well indeed might she thank the Divine bestower of all forgiveness. The
+legacy was not after all a large one. Mrs. Brown's annuity died with her;
+she left little more money than buried her decently; the ground lease of
+the house in which she had originally resided was almost out, and the
+bequest was in reality limited to the present abode of Rachel; but
+invaluable to her indeed, was the shelter of that humble home, now her
+own for ever.
+
+And when all was over; when the grave had closed on one, who not being at
+peace herself, could not give peace to others, when Rachel and her father
+remained alone in the little house, now hushed and silenced from all rude
+and jarring sounds, safe from all tyrannical interference, Rachel felt,
+with secret thankfulness, that if her lot was not happy, according to
+human weakness, it was blest with peace and quiet, and all the good that
+from them spring. If a cloud still lingered over it, it was only because,
+looking at her father, she remembered the unfulfilled desire of her
+heart; and if on days otherwise now marked with peace, there sometimes
+fell the darkness of a passing shadow, it was only when she saw and felt
+too keenly the sorrows of others.
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX.
+
+
+Richard Jones still hoped: "Mary was so young!" He would hope. But it was
+not to be; he had but tasted the cup of his sorrows; to the dregs was he
+to drink it; the earthly idol on which he had set his heart was to be
+snatched from him; he was to waken one day to the bitter knowledge:
+"there is no hope!"
+
+How he felt we know not, and cannot tell: none have a right to describe
+that grief save they who have passed through it; we dare not unveil the
+father's heart: we deal but with the external aspect of things, and sad
+and bitter enough it was.
+
+In a silent shop, where the sugar seemed to shrink away in the casks,
+where the tea-chests looked hollow, where dust gathered on the counter,
+on the shelves, in the corners, everywhere; where all looked blasted and
+withered by the deadly upas tree opposite, you might have seen a haggard
+man who stood there day after day, waiting for customers that came not,
+and who from behind his shop windows drearily watched the opposite shop,
+always full; thriving, fattening on his ruin; or who, sadder sight to his
+eyes and heart, looked at the little back parlour, where on her sick bed
+his dying daughter lay.
+
+Mary, as her illness drew towards its close, became fanciful, she
+insisted on having her bed brought down to the back parlour, and would
+leave her door open, "in order to mind the shop," she said. If anything
+could hasten her father's ruin, this did it: the few customers whom he
+had left, gradually dropped off, scared away by that sick girl, looking
+at them with her eager, glittering eyes.
+
+He sat by her one evening in a sad and very bitter mood. She was ill,
+very ill, and for three days not a soul had crossed the threshold of his
+shop. His love and his ambition were passing away together from his life.
+
+"Father," querulously said Mary, "why did you shut the shop so early?"
+For since her illness the young girl's mind was always running on the
+shop.
+
+"Where's the use of leaving it open?" huskily answered Jones, "unless
+it's to see them all going to the two Teapots opposite."
+
+"Well, but I wish you had not," she resumed, "it looks so dull and so
+dark."
+
+It is very likely that to please her, Richard Jones would have gone and
+taken the shutters down; but for a knock at the private door.
+
+"There's Miss Gray," said Mary, her face lighting.
+
+Richard Jones went and opened it; it was Rachel Gray. The light of the
+candle which he held fell full on his face; Rachel was struck with its
+haggard expression.
+
+"You do not look well, Mr. Jones," she said.
+
+"Don't I, Miss Gray," he replied, with a dreary smile, "well, that's a
+wonder! Look here!" he added, leading her into the shop where his tallow
+candle shed but a dim, dull light, "look here," he continued, raising it
+high, and turning it round so that it cast its faint gleam over the whole
+place, "look here; there's a shop for you, Miss Gray. How long ago is it
+since you, and your mother, and Mary and I we settled that shop? Look at
+it now, I say--look at it now. Look here!" and he thrust the light down
+a cask, "empty! Look there!" and he raised the lid of a tea-chest,
+"empty! Do you wish to try the drawers? Oh! they are all labelled, but
+what's in 'em. Miss Gray? nothing! It's well the customers have left off
+coming; for I couldn't serve them; couldn't accommodate them, I am sorry
+to say," and he laughed very bitterly. "I was happy when I came here," he
+resumed, "I had hope; I thought there was an opening; I thought there was
+room for me. I set up this shop; I did it all up myself, as you know--
+every inch of it; I painted it; I put the fixtures in; I drove every nail
+in with my own hand, and what's been the upshot of it all, Miss Gray?"
+
+Rachel raised her soft brown eyes to his:
+
+"It is the will of God," she said, "and God knows best, for He is good."
+
+Richard Jones looked at her and smiled almost sternly, for suffering
+gives dignity to the meanest, and no man, when he feels deeply, is the
+same man as when his feelings are unstirred.
+
+"Miss Gray," he said, "I have worked from my youth--slaved some would
+say; I hoped to make out something for myself and my child, and it was
+more of her than of myself I thought I wronged none; I did my best; a
+rich man steps in, and I am bewared--and you tell me God is good--mind,
+I don't say he aint--but is he good to me?"
+
+Rachel Gray shook with nervous emotion from head to foot She was pained--
+she was distressed at the question. Still more distressed because her
+mind was so bewildered, because her ideas were in such strange tumult,
+that with the most ardent wish to speak, she could not. As when in a
+dream we struggle to move and cannot, our will being fettered by the
+slumber of the body, so Rachel felt then, so alas! for her torment she
+felt almost always; conscious of truths sublime, beautiful and consoling,
+but unable to express them in speech.
+
+"God is good," she said again, clinging to that truth as to her anchor of
+safety.
+
+Again Richard Jones smiled.
+
+"And my child, Miss Gray," he said, lowering his voice so that his words
+could not reach the next room, "going by inches before my very eyes; yet
+I must look on and not go mad. I must be beggared, and I must bear it; I
+must become childless, and I must bear it. And the wicked thrive, and the
+wicked's children outlive them, for God is good to them, Miss Gray."
+
+The eyes of Rachel filled with tears; her brow became clouded.
+
+"Ah! Mr. Jones," she said, "do not complain; you have loved your child."
+
+"What are you keeping Miss Gray there for?" pettishly said the voice of
+Mary, "I want her."
+
+"And here I am, dear," said Rachel, going in to her, "I am come to sit a
+while with you; for I am sure your poor father wants rest, does he not?"
+
+"I don't want any one to sit with me," impatiently replied Mary, "I am
+not so ill as all that."
+
+"But do you sleep at night?"
+
+"No, I can't--I am so feverish."
+
+"Well, then, we sit up with you to keep you company," said her father.
+
+This explanation apparently satisfied Mary, who began to talk of other
+things. She knew not she was dying; whence should the knowledge have come
+to a mere child like her. None had told her the truth. And she was
+passing away into eternity, unconscious--her heart, her thoughts, her
+soul full of the shadows of life.
+
+Rachel saw and knew it, and it grieved her. She remembered her little
+sister's happy and smiling death-bed, and from her heart she prayed that
+a similar blessing might crown the last hours of little Mary; that she
+might go to her God like a child to her father.
+
+And when Richard Jones, after sitting up with them until twelve, went
+upstairs to rest awhile, and Rachel heard Mary talk of her recovery, and
+of projects and hopes, vain to her as a dream, she could not help feeling
+that it was her duty to speak. They were alone, "yes, now," thought
+Rachel, "now is the time to speak."
+
+Oh! hard and bitter task: to tell the young of death; the hoping that
+they must not hope; to tell those who would so fondly delay and linger in
+this valley, that they must depart for the land that is so near, and that
+seems so far. Rachel knew not how to begin. Mary opened the subject.
+
+"I shall be glad when I am well again," she said, "I am tired of this
+little room; it seems so dull when I see the sun shine in the street,
+don't it, Miss Gray?"
+
+"I dare say it does: you remind me of a little story I once read; shall I
+tell it to you?"
+
+"Oh! yes you may," carelessly replied Mary, yawning slightly; she thought
+Miss Gray prosy at times.
+
+"It is not a long story," said Rachel timidly, "and here it is; a king
+was once hunting alone in a wood, when he heard a very beautiful voice
+singing very sweetly; he went on and saw a poor leper."
+
+"What's a leper?" interrupted Mary.
+
+"Don't you remember the lepers in the Gospel, who were made clean by our
+Saviour? they were poor things, who had a bad and loathsome complaint,
+and this man, whom the king heard singing, was one; and the king could
+not help saying to him, 'how can you sing when you seem in so wretched a
+condition?' But the leper replied, 'it is because I am in this state that
+I sing, for as my body decays, I know that the hour of my deliverance
+draws nigh, that I shall leave this miserable world, and go to my Lord
+and my God.'"
+
+Mary looked at Rachel surprised at the impressive and earnest tone with
+which she spoke.
+
+"Well but, Miss Gray," she said, at length, "what is there like me in
+this story; I am not a leper, am I?"
+
+"We are all lepers," gently said Rachel, "for we are all sinners, and sin
+is to the soul what leprosy is to the body; it defiles it, and we all
+should be glad to die; for Christ has conquered death, and with death sin
+ends, and our true life, the life in God begins."
+
+Mary raised herself on one elbow. She looked at Rachel fixedly,
+earnestly; "Miss Gray," she said; "what do you mean?"
+
+Rachel did not reply--she could not.
+
+"Why do you tell me all these things?" continued Mary.
+
+And still Rachel could not speak.
+
+"Miss Gray," said Mary, "am _I_ going to die?" She looked wistfully in
+Rachel's face, and the beseeching tone of her young childish voice seemed
+to pierce Rachel's heart; but she had began; could not, she dared not go
+back. She rose, she clasped her hands, she trembled from head to foot,
+tears streamed down her cheek; her voice faltered so that she could
+scarcely speak, but she mastered it, clear and distinct the words came
+out. "Mary, we must all obey the will of God; we came into this world at
+His will, at His will we must leave it."
+
+"And must I leave it, Miss Gray?" asked Mary, persisting in her
+questioning like a child.
+
+Rachel stooped over her; the fast tears poured from her face on Mary's
+pale brow, "yes, my darling," she said softly, "yes, you must leave this
+miserable earth of trouble and sorrow, and go to God your friend and your
+father."
+
+The weakest, the frailest creatures often rise to heroic courage. This
+fretful, pettish child heard her sentence with some wonder, but
+apparently without sorrow.
+
+"Don't cry, Miss Gray," she said, "_I_ don't cry; but do you know, it
+seems so odd that I should die, doesn't it now?"
+
+Rachel did not reply, nor did she attempt it; her very heart was wrung.
+Mary guessed, or saw it.
+
+"I wish you would not fret," she said, "I wish you would not. Miss Gray.
+_I_ don't, you see."
+
+"Ay," thought Rachel, "you do not, my poor child, for what do you know of
+death?" And a little while after this, Mary, who felt heavy, fell asleep
+with her hand in that of Rachel Gray.
+
+
+CHAPTER XX.
+
+
+Three days had passed.
+
+The morning was gray and dull. He had sat up all night by Mary; for
+Rachel, exhausted with fatigue, had been unable to come. Poor little
+Mary, her hour was nigh; she knew it, and her young heart grieved for her
+father, so soon to be childless. She thought of herself too; she looked
+over the whole of her young life, and she saw its transgressions and its
+sins with a sorrow free from faithless dismay; for Rachel had said to
+her: "Shall we dare to limit for ourselves, or for others, the unfathomed
+mercy of God?"
+
+"Father," she suddenly said, "I want to speak to you."
+
+"What is it, my darling?" he asked, bending over her fondly. She looked
+up in his face, her cheeks flushed with a deeper hectic, her glassy eyes
+lit with a brighter light.
+
+"Father," she said, "I have been a naughty child, have I not?"
+
+"No--no, my little pet, never, indeed, never."
+
+"I know I have been naughty, father; I 'have been,' oh! so cross at
+times; but, father, I could not help it--at least, it seemed as if I
+could not--my back ached so, and indeed," she added, clasping her hands,
+"I am very sorry, father, very sorry."
+
+He stooped still nearer to her; he laid his cheek on her pillow; he
+kissed her hot brow, little Mary half smiled.
+
+"You forgive me, don't you?" she murmured faintly.
+
+"Forgive you! my pet--my darling."
+
+"Yes, pray do," she said.
+
+She could scarcely speak now; there was a film on her eyes, too. He saw
+it gathering fast, very fast. Suddenly she seemed to revive like a dying
+flame. Again she addressed him.
+
+"Father!" she said, "why don't you take down the shutters?"
+
+And with singular earnestness she fixed her eyes on his. Take down the
+shutters? The question seemed a stab sent through his very heart. Yet he
+mastered himself, and replied: "'Tis early yet; 'tis very early, my
+darling."
+
+"No 'taint," she said, in her old pettish way, and then she murmured in a
+low and humbled tone: "Ah! I forget--I forget. I did not mean to be
+cross again. Indeed I did not, father, so pray forgive me."
+
+"Don't think of it, my pet. Do you wish for anything?"
+
+"Nothing, father, but that you would take down the shutters."
+
+He tried to speak--he could not; only a few broken sounds gasped on his
+lips for utterance.
+
+"Because you see," she continued with strange earnestness, "the customers
+will all be coming and wondering if they see the shop shut; and they will
+think me worse, and so--and so--"
+
+She could not finish the sentence, but she tried to do so.
+
+"And so you see, father." Again the words died away. Her father raised
+his head; he looked at her; he saw her growing very white. Again he bent,
+and softly whispered: "My darling, did you say your prayers this
+morning?"
+
+An expression of surprise stole over the child's wan face.
+
+"I had forgotten," she replied, faintly, "I shall say them now." She
+folded her thin hands, her lips moved. "Our father who art in heaven,"
+she said, and she began a prayer that was never finished upon earth.
+
+The dread moment had come. The angel of death stood in that hushed room;
+swiftly and gently he fulfilled his errand, then departed, leaving all in
+silence, breathless and deep.
+
+He knew it was all over. He rose; he closed the eyes, composed the
+slender limbs, then he sat down by his dead child, a desolate man--a
+heart-broken father. How long he sat thus he knew not; a knock at the
+door at length roused him. Mechanically he rose and went and opened. He
+saw a man who at once stepped in and closed the door, and before the man
+spoke, Jones knew his errand.
+
+"It's all right," he said, "I know, the landlord could scarcely help it;
+come in."
+
+The bailiff was a bluff, hearty-looking man; he gave Jones a sound slap
+on the shoulder.
+
+"You are a trump! that's what you are," he said, with a big oath.
+
+Jones did not answer, but showed his guest into the back parlour.
+
+"Halloo! what's that?" cried the bailiff, attempting to raise the
+bed-curtain.
+
+"Don't," said Jones, in a husky voice.
+
+Then the man saw what it was, and he exclaimed quite ruefully: "I am very
+sorry--I am very sorry."
+
+"You can't help it," meekly said Jones, "you must do your duty."
+
+"Why that's what I always say," cried the bailiff with a second oath,
+rather bigger than the first, "a man must do his duty, mustn't he?" and a
+third oath slipped out.
+
+"Don't swear, pray don't!" said Jones.
+
+"And if I do, may I be--" here the swearing bailiff paused aghast at what
+he was going to add. "I can't help myself like," he said, rather
+ruefully, "it's second natur, you see, second natur. But I'll try and not
+do it--I'll try."
+
+And speaking quite softly, spite of his swearing propensities, he looked
+wistfully at Jones; but the childless father's face remained a blank.
+
+"Make yourself at home," he said in a subdued voice. "I think you'll find
+all you want in that cupboard, at least 'tis all I have."
+
+And he resumed his place by the dead.
+
+"All I want, and all you have," muttered the bailiff with his head in the
+cupboard. "Then faith, my poor fellow, 'tain't much."
+
+The day was chill and very dreary; the bailiff smoked his pipe by the low
+smouldering fire, and yawned over a dirty old newspaper. Two hours had
+passed thus when Jones said to him: "You don't want for anything, do
+you?"
+
+"Why no," musingly replied the bailiff, taking out his pipe, and looking
+up from his paper, "thank you, I can't say I want for anything, but what
+have you to say to a glass of grog, eh?"
+
+He rather brightened himself at the idea.
+
+"I'll send for anything you like," drearily replied Jones, and it was
+plain he had not understood as relating to himself the kindly meant
+proposal.
+
+The bailiff rather stiffly said, he wanted nothing.
+
+"Well then," resumed Jones, slipping off his shoes, "I'll leave you for
+awhile."
+
+"Why, where are you going?" cried the other staring.
+
+"There," said Jones, and raising the curtain, he crept in to his dead
+darling.
+
+The curtain shrouded him in; he was alone--alone with his child and his
+grief. A little child he had cradled her in his arms; many a time had she
+slept in that fond embrace, to her both a protection and a caress. And
+now! He looked at the little pale face that had fallen asleep in prayer;
+he saw it lying on its pillow in death-like stillness; and if he
+repressed the groan that rose to his lips the deeper was his anguish.
+
+Oh, passion! eloquent pages have been wasted on thy woes; volumes have
+been written to tell mankind of thy delights and thy torments. To no
+other tale will youth bend its greedy ear, of no other feelings will man
+acknowledge the power to charm his spirit and his heart. And here was one
+who knew thee not in name or in truth, and yet who drank to the dregs,
+and to the last bitterness his cup of sorrow. Oh! miserable and unpoetic
+griefs of the prosaic poor. Where are ye, elements of power and pathos of
+our modern epic: the novel? A wretched shop that will not take, a sickly
+child that dies! Ay, and were the picture but drawn by an abler hand,
+know proud reader, if proud thou art, that thy very heart could bleed,
+that thy very soul would be wrung to read this page from a poor man's
+story.
+
+And so he lay by his dead, swelling with a tearless agony, a nameless and
+twofold desolation. Gaze not on that grief--eye of man: thou art
+powerless to pity, for thou art powerless to understand.
+
+"Only think!" said a neighbour to Mrs. Smith, "Mr. Jones's shutters have
+been closed the whole day. I can't think what the matter is."
+
+"Can't you," replied Mrs. Smith laughing, "why, woman, the shop is shut."
+
+Ay, the shop was shut. The shop which Richard Jones had opened with so
+much pride--the shop which he had ever linked with his child, closed on
+the day of her death, and never reopened. He did not care. His little
+ambition was wrecked; his little pride was broken; his little cruise of
+love had been poured forth upon the earth by God's own hand; it was empty
+and dry; arid sand and dust had drunk up its once sweet waters.
+
+What a man without ambition, pride, and lore may be, he had become in the
+one day that bereaved him.
+
+Pity not him, reader; his tale is told; pity him whose bitter story of
+hope and disappointment but begins as I write, and as you read. For
+mortal hand has not sounded the bitter depth of such woes. In them live
+the true tragic passions that else seem to have passed from the earth;
+passions that could rouse the meekest to revenge and wrath, if daily dew
+from heaven fell not on poor parched hearts, as nightly it comes down
+from the skies above, on thirsting earth.
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI.
+
+
+A time may come when the London churchyard shall be remembered as a thing
+that has been and is no more; but now who knows it not? Who need describe
+the serried gravestones that mark the resting places in this sad field of
+death; who need tell how they stare at busy passers by through their iron
+grating--how they look ghastly, like the guest of the Egyptian feast,
+dead in the midst of tumult and riotous life.
+
+Dreary are they when the sun shines on them, and their rank weeds, the
+sun which those beneath feel not, but more dreary by far when the
+drizzling rain pours down the dark church walls and filters into the
+sodden earth. And in such a place, and on such a day did they make the
+grave of Mary Jones.
+
+Two mourners stood by: a woman and a man. When all was over, when earth
+had closed over the grave and its contents, the man sat down on a
+neighbouring gravestone, and looked at that red mound which held his all,
+with a dreary stolid gaze of misery and woe.
+
+Rachel bent over him, and gently laid her hand on his shoulder.
+
+"Mr. Jones, you must come!" she said.
+
+He made no reply, he did not rise, and when she took his hand to lead him
+away, he yielded without resistance. She took him to her own house.
+Kindly and tenderly she led him, like a little child, and a child he
+seemed to have become, helpless, inert--without will, without power.
+
+His own home was a wreck, the prey of creditors, who found but little
+there, yet sufficient, for their claims were few, to save him from
+disgrace. Rachel Gray gave him the room where his child once had slept,
+where he had come in to look at her in her sleep, and fondly bent over
+her pillow: he burst into tears as he entered it; and those tears
+relieved him, and did him good.
+
+At the end of two days he rallied from his torpor; he awoke, he
+remembered he was a man born to work, to earn his daily bread, and bear
+the burden of life.
+
+He went out one morning, and looked for employment. Something he found to
+do; but what it was he told not Rachel. When she gently asked, he shook
+his head and smiled bitterly.
+
+"It don't matter. Miss Gray," he said; "it don't matter."
+
+No doubt it was some miserable, poorly paid task. Yet he only spoke the
+truth, when he said it mattered little. He lived and laboured, like
+thousands; but he cared not for to-day, and thought not of to-morrow; the
+Time of Promise and of Hope had for ever departed. What though he should
+feel want, so long as he could pay his weekly rent to Rachel Gray, he
+cared not. There is an end to all things; and as for his old age, should
+he grow old, had he not the parish and the workhouse? And so Richard
+Jones could drag on through life, of all hopes, save the heavenly hope,
+forsaken.
+
+But Heaven chose to chastise and humble still further, this already
+chastised and sorely humbled man. He fell ill, and remained for weeks on
+his sick bed, a burden cast on the slender means of Rachel Gray. In vain
+he begged and prayed to be sent to the workhouse or some hospital; Rachel
+would not hear of it. She kept him, she attended on him with all the
+devotedness of a daughter; between him and her father she divided her
+time. Earnestly Jones prayed for death: the boon was not granted; he
+recovered.
+
+They sat together and alone one evening in the quiet little parlour--
+alone, for Thomas Gray was no one, when there came a knock at the door,
+and the visitor admitted by Rachel, proved to be Joseph Saunders.
+
+"Mr. Jones is within," hesitatingly said Rachel
+
+"And I just want to speak to him," briefly replied Saunders, "so that's
+lucky."
+
+He walked into the parlour as he spoke; Rachel followed, wondering what
+was to be the issue. On seeing his enemy, poor Jones reddened slightly
+but the flush soon died away, and in a meek, subdued voice, he was the
+first to say "good evening."
+
+"Sorry to hear you have been ill," said Saunders sitting down, "but you
+are coming round, ain't you?"
+
+"I am much better," was the quiet reply.
+
+"Got anything to do?" bluntly asked Saunders.
+
+"Nothing as yet," answered Jones with a subdued groan, for he thought of
+Rachel, so poor herself, and the burden he was to her.
+
+"Well then, Mr. Jones; just listen to me!" said Saunders, drawing his
+chair near, "I know you have a grudge against me."
+
+"You have ruined me," said Jones.
+
+"Pshaw, man, 'twas all fair, all in the way of business," exclaimed
+Saunders a little impatiently.
+
+"You have ruined me," said Jones again; "but I forgive you, I have long
+ago forgiven you, and the shadow of a grudge against you, or living man,
+I have not, thank God!"
+
+"That's all right enough," emphatically said Saunders; "still, Mr. Jones,
+you say I have ruined you. It isn't the first time either that you have
+said so, and with some people, I may as well tell you it has injured me."
+
+"I am sorry if it has," meekly said Jones.
+
+"And I don't care a button," frankly declared Saunders, "but as I was
+saying, that's your belief, your impression; and to be sure it's true
+enough in one sense, but then, Mr. Jones, you should not look at your
+side of the question only. Mr. Smithson meant to set up a grocer's shop
+long before you opened yours; he spoke to me about it, and if I had only
+agreed then, it was done; you came, to be sure, but what of that? the
+street was as free to us as to you; that I lodged in your house was an
+accident; I did not know when I took your room that I should supplant you
+some day. I did not know Smithson had still kept that idea in his head,
+and that finding no situation I should be glad to consent at last. Well,
+I did consent, and I did compete with you, and knocked you over, as it
+were, but Mr. Jones, would not another have done it? And was it not all
+honourable, fair play?"
+
+"Well, I suppose it was," sadly replied Jones, "and since it was a
+settled thing that I was to be a ruined man, I suppose I ought not to
+care who did it."
+
+"Come, that's talking sense," said Saunders, with a nod of approbation,
+"and now, Mr. Jones, we'll come to business, for I need not tell you nor
+Miss Gray either, that I did not come in here to rip up old sores. You
+must know that the young fellow who used to serve in my shop has taken
+himself off, he's going to Australia, he says, but that's neither here
+nor there; I have a regard for you, Mr. Jones, and having injured you
+without malice, I should like to do you a good turn of my own free will;
+and then there's my wife, who was quite cut up when she heard you had
+lost your little daughter, and who has such a regard for Miss Gray, but
+that's neither here nor there; the long and short of it is, will you
+serve in my shop, and have a good berth and moderate wages, and perhaps
+an increase if the business prospers?"
+
+Poor Richard Jones! This was the end of all his dreams, his schemes, his
+anger, his threatened revenge! And yet, strange to say, he felt it very
+little. Every strong and living feeling lay buried in a grave. His soul
+was as a thing dead within him; his pride had crumbled into dust, as Mary
+would have said: his spirit was gone.
+
+The humiliation of accepting Joseph Saunders proposal,--and, however
+strange, it was certainly well and kindly meant--Richard Jones did not
+consider. He looked at the advantages, and found them manifest; there lay
+the means of paying Rachel, of covering his few debts, and of securing to
+his wearied life the last and dearly-bought boon of repose. Awhile he
+reflected, then said aloud: "I shall be very glad of it, lam very much
+obliged to you, Mr. Saunders."
+
+"Well, then, it's done," said Mr. Saunders, rising, "good night, Jones,
+cheer up, old fellow. Good night, Miss Gray; Jane sends her love, you
+know. Sorry the old gentleman's no better." And away he departed, very
+well satisfied with the success of his errand.
+
+"Oh! Mr. Jones!" exclaimed Rachel, when she returned to the parlour.
+
+"Don't mention it," he said with a faint smile, "I don't mind it, Miss
+Gray."
+
+"But could you not have stayed here?" she asked.
+
+"And be a burden upon you I that's what I have done too long, Miss Gray."
+
+"But until you found employment elsewhere, you might have remained."
+
+"His house is as good as any; his bread is not more bitter than
+another's," replied Jones, in a subdued voice, "besides, now that my Mary
+is gone, what need I care, Miss Gray?" And as he saw that her eyes were
+dim, he added: "You need not pity me, Miss Gray, the bitterness of my
+trouble is, and has long been over. My Mary is not dead for me. She is,
+and ever will be, living for her old father, until the day of meeting.
+And whilst I am waiting for that day, you do not think I care about what
+befalls me."
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII.
+
+
+Once more Rachel was alone. Once more solitude and the silence of the
+quiet street, shrouded her in.
+
+A new life now began for Rachel Gray. Like a plant long bent by adverse
+winds, she slowly recovered elasticity of spirit, and lightness of heart.
+What she might have been, but for the gloom of her youth, Rachel never
+was; but as the dark cloud, which had long hung over her, rolled away, as
+she could move, speak, eat, and think unquestioned in her little home, a
+gleam of sunshine, pale but pure, shone over her life with that late-won
+liberty. Her speech became more free, her smile was more frequent, her
+whole manner more open and cheerful.
+
+Rachel lived, however, both by taste and by long habit, in great
+retirement, and saw but few people. Indeed, almost her only visitors were
+Richard Jones and Madame Rose. The little Frenchwoman now and then
+dropped in, looked piteously at Thomas Gray, shrugged her shoulders,
+nodded, winked, and did everything to make herself understood, but talk
+English; and Rachel listened to her, and laughed gaily at the strange
+speech and strange ways of her little friend.
+
+Richard Jones was a still more frequent visitor. He came to receive, not
+to give sympathy. The society of Rachel Gray was to him a want of his
+life, for to her alone he could talk of Mary; he spoke and she listened,
+and in listening gave the best and truest consolation. Now and then, not
+often, for Rachel felt and knew that such language frequently repeated
+wearies the ear of weak humanity, she ventured to soothe his grief with
+such ailments as she could think of. And her favorite one, one which she
+often applied to herself and her own troubles was: "We receive blessings
+from the hand of God, shall we not also take sorrow when it pleases Him
+to inflict it?"
+
+"Very true. Miss Gray, very true," humbly assented Richard Jones.
+
+Of his present position he never spoke, unless when questioned by Rachel,
+and when he did so, it was to say that "Saunders and his wife were very
+kind to him, very kind. And I am quite happy, Miss Gray," he would add,
+"quite happy."
+
+And thus like a hidden stream flowed on the life of Rachel Gray, silent,
+peaceful and very still. It slept in the shadow of the old grey street,
+in the quiet shelter of a quiet home, within the narrow circle of plain
+duties. Prayer, Love, Meditation and Thought graced it daily. It was
+humble and lowly in the eyes of man; beautiful and lovely in the sight of
+God.
+
+And thus quiet and happy years had passed away, and nothing had arrested
+their monotonous flow.
+
+It was evening, Rachel and her father were alone in the little parlour.
+Thomas Gray was still a childish old man, bereft of knowledge and of
+sense. Yet now, as Rachel helped him to his chair, and settled him in it,
+something, a sort of light seemed to her to pass athwart the old man's
+face, and linger in his dull eyes.
+
+"Father!" she cried, "do you know me?"
+
+In speech he answered not, but it seemed to her that in his look she read
+conscious kindness. She pressed his hand, and it appeared to press hers
+in return; she laid her cheek to his, and it did not seem lifeless or
+cold. Then, again she withdrew from him and said:
+
+"Father, do you know me?"
+
+He looked at her searchingly and was long silent: at length he spoke, and
+in a low but distinct voice, said: "Rachel."
+
+In a transport of joy, Rachel sank at his feet and sobbing clasped her
+arms around him.
+
+"Never mind, Rachel," he said, "never mind."
+
+"Father, father," she cried, "you know me, say you know me."
+
+But she asked too much, it was but a dawn of intelligence that had
+returned; never was the full day to shine upon earth.
+
+"Never mind, Rachel," he said again, "never mind."
+
+But though the first ardour of her hopes was damped, her joy was
+exquisite and deep. Her father knew her, he had uttered her name with
+kindness, in his feeble and imperfect and childish way, he loved her!
+What more then was needed by one who like the humble lover recorded by
+the Italian poet, had ever
+
+   "Desired much, hoped little, nothing asked."
+
+
+Somewhat late that same evening, Richard Jones knocked at Rachel's door.
+As she opened to him the light she held shone on her face, and though he
+was not an observant man, he was struck with her aspect. There was a
+flush on her cheek, a light in her eyes, a smile on her lips, a radiance
+and a joy in Rachel's face which Richard Jones had never seen there
+before. He looked at her inquiringly, but she only smiled and showed him
+in.
+
+And now, reader, one last picture before we part.
+
+It is evening, as you know, and three are sitting in the little parlour
+of Rachel Gray. An autumn evening it is, somewhat chill with a bright
+fire burning in the grate, and lighting up with flickering flame the
+brown furniture and narrow room. And of these three who sit there, one is
+a grey, childish old man in an arm-chair; another, a man who is not old,
+but whose hair has turned prematurely white with trouble and sorrow; the
+third is a meek, thoughtful woman with a book on her knees, who sits
+silently brooding over the words her lips have uttered; for she has been
+reading how the Lord gives and how the Lord takes away, and how we yet
+must bless the name of the Lord.
+
+The good seed of these words has not been shed on a barren soil. As
+Richard Jones sits and dreams of his lost darling, he also dreams of
+their joyful meeting some day on the happier shore, and perhaps now that
+time has passed over his loss and that its first bitterness has faded
+away, perhaps he confesses with humble and chastened heart, that meet and
+just was the doom which snatched from him his earthly idol, and, for a
+while, took away the too dearly loved treasure of his heart.
+
+And Rachel Gray, too, has her thoughts. As she looks at her father, and
+whilst thankful for what she has obtained, as she yet longs, perhaps, for
+the full gift she never can possess; if her heart feels a pang, if
+repining it questions and says: "Oh! why have I not too a father to love
+and know me, not imperfectly, but fully--completely," a sweet and secret
+voice replies: "You had set your heart on human love, and because you had
+set your heart upon it, it was not granted to you. Complain not, murmur
+not, Rachel, if thou hast not thy father upon earth, remember that thou
+hast thy Father in Heaven!"
+
+THE END.
+
+
+
+PRINTED BY BERNHARD TAUCHNITZ.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RACHEL GRAY***
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