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"Tell me though, Nina, what would you have me do?" His sister told him of the arrangement she had already made with Jack Raby. "Come, my brother, decide what part you will take there is no time to be lost; oh! let it be that one worthy of your generous nature." "Nina, I will do as you wish," Paolo gasped forth, after a long silence.
This child had been to her from the day of his birth like her own: she loved him with all the pent-up forces of the great womanhood within her, which thus far had not found the natural outlet of its affections. "Doctor," she would cry vehemently, "why should Raby die? God never means that any children should die. It is all our ignorance and carelessness; all the result of broken law.
Little "and," said she, "how lucky! he has almost promised to grant me the first favor I ask him. Well, I shall entreat him to be a good nephew, and do whatever dear Mr. Raby asks him. But of course I shall not say, and then if you do, you and I" here the young lady cut her sentence very short. "Of course not," said Mrs. Little. "THAT will follow as a matter of course.
You have done nothing but fidget, fidget for the last half-hour." "I want to go out, Aunt Raby." "To go out? Sakes! what for? And on such a night, too!" "I want to see Mr. Hayes." "Prissie, I think you have got a bee in your bonnet. You'll be lost in this mist." "No, I won't. I missed Mr. Hayes to-day when he called, and I must see him before I go back to St. Benet's.
During these days, while Hetty was unflinchingly going forward with all her preparations for her new home, the home she had left was a scene of terrible dismay and suffering. It was long after dark when little Raby, breathless and sobbing, had burst open the sitting-room door, crying out: "Auntie's drowned in the lake. I know she is; or else a bear's eaten her up.
She keeps the accounts, writes out the bills, superintends the linen, and sews on the general shirt-buttons. Think of having such a woman at home to sew on one's shirt-buttons! But peace, peace, thou foolish heart! Miss Raby is the Doctor's niece.
Raby disappeared, and the sword-dancers returned to the kitchen, talking over this strange matter as they went. Grace retired to the drawing-room followed by Coventry. She sat silent some time, and he watched her keenly. "I wonder what has become of Mr. Raby?" Mr. Coventry did not know. "I hope he is not going out." "I should think not, it is a very cold night; clear, but frosty."
"He has lost his best friend, as well as I," he said to himself; "I ought to try to comfort him." But it was impossible: the child's presence grew more and more irksome to him, until, at last, he said to Sally, one day: "Sally, you and Raby are both looking very ill. I want you to go away for a time. How would you like to go to 'The Runs, for a month?"
He knew better than go past Raby Hall to it: he went back toward Hillsborough, full three miles, and then turned off the road and got on the heather. He skirted the base of a heathery mound, and at last saw the church on an elevation before him, made for it incautiously over some boggy ground, and sank in up to his waist.
James Little and his wife were now as much a part of the family as if they had had the old Squire's blood in their veins; and nobody thought about the old time of their disgrace, nobody but Jim and Sally themselves. From their thoughts it was never absent, when they looked on the beautiful, joyous face of Raby. He had grown beyond his years, and looked like a boy of twelve.
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