oose it
should. It is well that you are going back, for a little while, into
your native air. There has been too much weight on your spirits. The
house is too gloomy and lonesome; the shop is full of vexations; and as
for me, I have no faculty of making things look brighter than they are.
Dear Clifford has been your only comfort!"

"Come hither, Phoebe," suddenly cried her cousin Clifford, who had said
very little all the morning. "Close!--closer!--and look me in the
face!"

Phoebe put one of her small hands on each elbow of his chair, and
leaned her face towards him, so that he might peruse it as carefully as
he would. It is probable that the latent emotions of this parting hour
had revived, in some degree, his bedimmed and enfeebled faculties. At
any rate, Phoebe soon felt that, if not the profound insight of a seer,
yet a more than feminine delicacy of appreciation, was making her heart
the subject of its regard. A moment before, she had known nothing
which she would have sought to hide. Now, as if some secret were
hinted to her own consciousness through the medium of another's
perception, she was fain to let her eyelids droop beneath Clifford's
gaze. A blush, too,--the redder, because she strove hard to keep it
down,--ascended bigger and higher, in a tide of fitful progress, until
even her brow was all suffused with it.

"It is enough, Phoebe," said Clifford, with a melancholy smile. "When
I first saw you, you were the prettiest little maiden in the world; and
now you have deepened into beauty. Girlhood has passed into womanhood;
the bud is a bloom! Go, now--I feel lonelier than I did."

Phoebe took leave of the desolate couple, and passed through the shop,
twinkling her eyelids to shake off a dew-drop; for--considering how
brief her absence was to be, and therefore the folly of being cast down
about it--she would not so far acknowledge her tears as to dry them
with her handkerchief. On the doorstep, she met the little urchin
whose marvellous feats of gastronomy have been recorded in the earlier
pages of our narrative. She took from the window some specimen or
other of natural history,--her eyes being too dim with moisture to
inform her accurately whether it was a rabbit or a hippopotamus,--put
it into the child's hand as a parting gift, and went her way. Old
Uncle Venner was just coming out of his door, with a wood-horse and saw
on his shoulder; and, trudging along the street, he scrupled not to