nvestment had communicated that important
fact to her on his slate, she had indulged in a day-dream of her own,
which had filled her head for hours while sitting beside her kitchen
fire busily knitting long worsted stockings for her son Simon.

Simon was thirty years of age, and it was high time she found a wife
for him. Who could be better than Phebe, who had grown up under her own
eyes, a good, strong, industrious girl, with six hundred pounds and
Upfold Farm for her fortune? As she brooded over this idea, a second
thought grew out of it. How convenient it would be if she herself
married the dumb old father, and retired to the little farmstead,
changing places with Phebe, her daughter-in-law. She would still be near
enough to come down to her son's house at harvest-time and pig-killing,
and when the milk was abundant and cheese and butter to make. And the
little house on the hills was built with walls a yard thick, and well
lined with good oak wainscoting; she could keep it warm for herself and
the old man. The scheme had as much interest and charm for her as if she
had been a peeress looking out for an eligible alliance for her son.

But it had always proved difficult to take the first steps toward so
delicate a negotiation. She was not a ready writer; and even if she had
been, Mrs. Nixey felt that it would be almost impossible to write her
day-dream in bold and plain words upon old Marlowe's slate. If Marlowe
was deaf, Phebe was singularly blind and dull. Simon Nixey had played
with her when she was a child, but it had been always as a big, grown-up
boy, doing man's work; and it was only of late that she had realized
that he was not almost an old man. For the last year or two he had
lingered at the church door to walk home with her and her father, but
she had thought little of it. He was their nearest neighbor, and made
himself useful in giving her father hints about his little farm, besides
sparing his laborer to do them an occasional day's work. It seemed
perfectly natural that he should walk home with them across the moors
from their distant parish church.

But as soon as the roads were passable Mrs. Nixey made her way up to the
solitary farmstead. The last time she had seen old Marlowe he had been
ailing, yet she was quite unprepared for the rapid change that had
passed over him. He was cowering in the chimney-corner, his face yellow
and shrivelled, and his eyes, once blue as Phebe's own, sunken in their
socke