d made all things easy for the simplest
ceremony of dressing.

"Just sponge your face, my dear," she said, "and put on your
dressing-gown, and come down for half an hour or so."

"I'm all right now," said Tappitt.

"Oh! quite so;--but I wouldn't go to the trouble of much dressing."
Then she left him, descended the stairs, and entered the parlour
among her daughters. When there she could not abstain from one
blast of the trumpet of triumph. "Well, girls," she said, "it's all
settled, and we shall be in Torquay now before the winter."

"No!" said Augusta.

"That'll be a great change," said Martha.

"In Torquay before the winter!" said Cherry. "Oh, mamma, how clever
you have been!"

"And now your papa is coming down, and you should thank him for what
he's doing for you. It's all for your sake that he's doing it."

Mr. Tappitt crept into the room, and when he had taken his seat in
his accustomed arm-chair, the girls went up to him and kissed him.
Then they thanked him for his proposed kindness in taking them out of
the brewery.

"Oh, papa, it is so jolly!" said Cherry.

Mr. Tappitt did not say much in answer to this;--but luckily there
was no necessity that he should say anything. It was an occasion on
which silence was understood as giving a perfect consent.

CHAPTER XIII.

WHAT TOOK PLACE AT BRAGG'S END FARM.

When Mrs. Tappitt had settled within her own mind that the brewery
should be abandoned to Rowan, she was by no means, therefore, ready
to assent that Rachel Ray should become the mistress of the brewery
house. "Never," she had exclaimed when Cherry had suggested such a
result; "never!" And Augusta had echoed the protestation, "Never,
never!" I will not say that she would have allowed her husband to
remain in his business in order that she might thus exclude Rachel
from such promotion, but she could not bring herself to believe that
Luke Rowan would be so fatuous, so ignorant of his own interests, so
deluded, as to marry that girl from Bragg's End! It is thus that the
Mrs. Tappitts of the world regard other women's daughters when they
have undergone any disappointment as to their own. She had no reason
for wishing well to Rowan, and would not have cared if he had taken
to his bosom a harpy in marriage; but she could not endure to hear of
the success of the girl whose attractions had foiled her own little
plan. "I don't believe that the man can ever be such a fool as that!"
she said again to