everyone looked for help and advice.
Her mother collapsed utterly. She would sit for hours in that inaction,
which it is so painful to notice in those who have been once so full of
life and movement. The boys who had been sent for from school did not
return to it. Ralph surprised everyone by saying that he should give up
study, and come and live at home and help his mother--at any rate, till
Melville came back, if ever he did come back, to take his place at Fair
Acres. By interest exerted by the Bishop of Bath and Wells, Harry and
Bunny both got into the navy, and went forth, poor little boys, full of
hope and delight, to encounter the hardships which then were the
universal fate of little middys, in their first acquaintance with the
salt sea waves they loved so well.

It was touching to see the young brother and sister, who were left at
the head of affairs, resolutely doing their utmost to spare their
mother, and to keep things, as Mr. Watson called it, "square."

If he were old he was intensely useful and honourable; and Ralph's power
to adapt himself to his new manner of life was really wonderful. He set
himself to study the few and scanty agricultural books which were on his
father's shelves, and mastered the accounts in a way which Mr. Gell, the
lawyer, and Mr. Paget, the executor under the will, found to be
surprising.

Miss Falconer had sent many kind little notes on very deep black-edged
paper, and sealed with a large black seal, to "her dear afflicted
sister;" and Charlotte, who had returned from Barley Wood on the day
after Joyce left it, composed verses of doubtful rhythm, and still more
doubtful sense, which she sent, done up in brown paper parcels by the
carrier, as they were too voluminous to be conveyed in any other way.
Verses in which "bleeding hearts" and "rivers of tears," sought vainly
for appropriate rhymes; where "fears" refused to follow "bears," and
"eyes" was made to do duty again and again with "prize" and "sighs."
Mrs. More wrote a tender letter of sympathy to Joyce, and would have
driven over to see her, had not the shortening days and threatened cold
kept her a close prisoner. Indeed, she was laid low with one of her most
dangerous illnesses before September was over; and Miss Frowde and her
doctor thought it more than doubtful if, at her advanced age, she would
recover.

It was on a still October afternoon, when autumnal stillness reigned in
the woods and fields, that Joyce went to the