piece of
news with mingled curiosity and scepticism, occupied themselves with
their usual sports, or listened keenly, with sharp remarks, to the
sounds below, which only the utmost stretch of Nettie's authority could
keep them from descending to investigate, afforded a wonderful reverse
to the picture, which startled her in her momentary clearsightedness.
The contrast between her own feelings--she who had no bonds of natural
affection to Fred, and to whom he had been, by times, a very irksome
burden--and theirs, who were his very own, and belonged to him, appeared
to Nettie as no such contrast had ever appeared before. _Her_ heart
alone was heavy with regret over the ruined man--the now for ever
unredeemable life: she only, to whom his death was no loss, but even,
if she could have permitted that cruel thought to intervene, a gain and
relief, recognised with a pang of compassion almost as sharp as grief,
that grievous, miserable fate. When, a few minutes after, the noise of
the children's play rose to an outburst, Nettie flushed into a momentary
effusion of temper, and silenced the heartless imps with a voice and
look which they dared not venture to resist. Her rebuke was, however,
interrupted by a sudden call from their mother. "How can you have the
heart!--Oh, Nettie, Nettie! I knew you had no feeling!--you never had
any feeling since you were a baby--but how can you speak so to his poor
children, now that he has left them on the cold world?" cried Susan,
sobbing, from her bed. If Nettie sprang to her feet in sudden heat and
disgust, and peremptorily closed the doors intervening between the
children and their mother, nobody will much wonder at that movement of
impatience. Perhaps Nettie's eyes had never been so entirely opened to
the hopeless character of the charge she had taken upon her, as in the
temporary seclusion of that day.

And meanwhile, down-stairs, Edward Rider was superintending all the
arrangements of the time for Nettie's sake. Not because it was his
brother who lay there, no longer a burden to any man; nor because
natural duty pointed him out as the natural guardian of the orphaned
family. The doctor, indeed, would have done his duty in such a hard
case, however it had been required of him; but the circumstances were
different now: the melancholy bustle, the shame, the consciousness that
everybody knew what manner of existence this lost life had been, the
exposure, the publicity--all that would have w