Such was her letter; but it did not satisfy Mr Maguire, and he wrote a second letter. He had declined, he said, the incumbency among the mines, having heard of something which he thought would suit him better in Manchester. As to that, there was no immediate hurry, and he proposed remaining at Littlebath for the next two months, having been asked to undertake temporary duty in a neighbouring church for that time. By the end of the two months he hoped that “his Margaret” would be able to give him an answer in a different tone. As to her pecuniary position, he would leave that, he said, “all to herself.”

To this second letter Miss Mackenzie did not find it necessary to send any reply. The domestics in the Mackenzie family were not at this time numerous, and the poor mother had enough to do with her family downstairs. No nurse had been hired for the sick man, for nurses cannot be hired without money, and money with the Tom Mackenzies was scarce. Our Miss Mackenzie would have hired a nurse, but she thought it better to take the work entirely into her own hands. She did so, and I think we may say that her brother did not suffer by it. As she sat by his bedside, night after night, she seemed to feel that she had fallen again into her proper place, and she looked back upon the year she had spent at Littlebath almost with dismay. Since her brother’s death, three men had offered to marry her, and there was a fourth from whom she had expected such an offer. She looked upon all this with dismay, and told herself that she was not fit to sail, under her own guidance, out in the broad sea, amidst such rocks as those. Was not some humbly feminine employment, such as that in which she was now engaged, better for her in all ways? Sad as was the present occasion, did she not feel a satisfaction in what she was doing, and an assurance that she was fit for her position? Had she not always been ill at ease, and out of her element, while striving at Littlebath to live the life of a lady of fortune? She told herself that it was so, and that it would be better for her to be a hard-working, dependent woman, doing some tedious duty day by day, than to live a life of ease which prompted her to longings for things unfitted to her.

She had brought a little writing-desk with her that she had carried from Arundel Street to Littlebath, and this she had with her in the sick man’s bedroom. Sitting there through the long hours of night, she would open this and read over and over again those remnants of the rhymes written in her early days which she had kept when she made her great bonfire. There had been quires of such verses, but she had destroyed all but a few leaves before she started for Littlebath. What were left, and were now read, were very sweet to her, and yet she knew that they were wrong and meaningless. What business had such a one as she to talk of the sphere’s tune and the silvery moon, of bright stars shining and hearts repining? She would not for worlds have allowed any one to know what a fool she had been—either Mrs Tom, or John Ball, or Mr Maguire, or Miss Todd. She would have been covered with confusion if her rhymes had fallen into the hands of any one of them.