ter was postponed. There was still ample time
for arrangement before the bill would come due, and he would not tell
Fanny till he had made up his mind what that arrangement would be. It
would kill her, he said to himself over and over again, were he to
tell her of it without being able to tell her also that the means of
liquidating the debt were to be forthcoming.

And now I must say a word about Lucy Robarts. If one might only go
on without those descriptions how pleasant it would all be! But Lucy
Robarts has to play a forward part in this little drama, and those
who care for such matters must be made to understand something of her
form and likeness. When last we mentioned her as appearing, though
not in any prominent position, at her brother's wedding, she was only
sixteen; but now, at the time of her father's death, somewhat over
two years having since elapsed, she was nearly nineteen. Laying aside
for the sake of clearness that indefinite term of girl--for girls
are girls from the age of three up to forty-three, if not previously
married--dropping that generic word, we may say that then, at that
wedding of her brother, she was a child; and now, at the death of her
father, she was a woman. Nothing, perhaps, adds so much to womanhood,
turns the child so quickly into a woman, as such death-bed scenes as
these. Hitherto but little had fallen to Lucy to do in the way of
woman's duties. Of money transactions she had known nothing, beyond
a jocose attempt to make her annual allowance of twenty-five pounds
cover all her personal wants--an attempt which was made jocose by
the loving bounty of her father. Her sister, who was three years her
elder--for John came in between them--had managed the house; that
is, she had made the tea and talked to the house-keeper about the
dinners. But Lucy had sat at her father's elbow, had read to him of
evenings when he went to sleep, had brought him his slippers and
looked after the comforts of his easy chair. All this she had done
as a child; but when she stood at the coffin head, and knelt at the
coffin side, then she was a woman.

She was smaller in stature than either of her three sisters, to all
of whom had been acceded the praise of being fine women--a eulogy
which the people of Exeter, looking back at the elder sisters, and
the general remembrance of them which pervaded the city, were not
willing to extend to Lucy. "Dear--dear!" had been said of her; "poor
Lucy is not like a Robarts