re must have come from it, we should
say, more of regret than of pleasure; for when that room was first
furnished, under her own auspices, and when those horsehair chairs
were bought with a portion of her own modest dowry, doubtless she had
intended that these luxuries should be used by her and hers. But they
never had been so used. The day for using them had never come. Her
husband never, by any chance, entered the apartment. To him probably,
even in his youth, it had been a woman's gewgaw, useless, but
allowable as tending to her happiness. Now the door was never even
opened before his eye. His last interview with Carry had been in
that room,--when he had laid his curse upon her, and bade her begone
before his return, so that his decent threshold should be no longer
polluted by her vileness.

On this side of the house there was a cross passage, dividing the
front rooms from the back. At the end of this, looking to the front
so as to have the parlour between it and the house-door, was the
chamber in which slept Brattle and his wife. Here all those children
had been born who had brought upon the household so many joys and so
much sorrow. And behind, looking to the back on to the little plot of
vegetables which was called the garden,--a plot in which it seemed
that cabbages and gooseberry bushes were made to alternate,--there
was a large store-room, and the chamber in which Fanny slept,--now
alone, but which she had once shared with four sisters. Carry was the
last one that had left her; and now Fanny hardly dared to name the
word sister above her breath. She could speak, indeed, of Sister Jay,
the wife of the prosperous ironmonger at Warminster; but of sisters
by their Christian names no mention was ever made.

Upstairs there were garrets, one of which was inhabited by Sam, when
he chose to reside at home; and another by the red-armed country
lass, who was maid-of-all-work at Brattle Mill. When it has also been
told that below the cabbage-plot there was an orchard, stretching
down to the junction of the waters, the description of Brattle Mill
will have been made.

CHAPTER VII.

THE MILLER'S WIFE.

When Mr. Fenwick entered the kitchen, Mrs. Brattle was sitting there
alone. Her daughter was away, disposing of the remnants and utensils
of the dinner-table. The old lady, with her spectacles on her nose,
was sitting as usual with a stocking over her left arm. On the round
table was a great open Bible, and, lyi