He tottered back but for the support of the wall he would have fallen. "Let me go hence," he said, "into the open air. I cannot breathe in this house. How weak I am!"

His limbs trembling beneath him, he passed down the staircase, and went forth into the night, bitterly cold, and ghostly white from the snow thick upon the ground.

Stephen joined the doctor in his father's

room.

78

CHAPTER IV.

THE DOCTOR'S DAUGHTERS.

IT is to be presumed that Grilling Abbots ranked as a town rather than as a village, for the reason that every Wednesday throughout the year about three old women took it into their heads to assemble with their fruitstalls in what was called the High Street-apparently because there was no other street of any kind whatever-and there hold what they chose to term a

market. limited open-air, day-light conversazione, no doubt this weekly meeting was as pleasant to the few concerned in it as it was certainly harmless to the rest of the world; but viewed in the light of an affair attended with financial results of any importance whatever, it be pronounced a decided failure. Nevertheless the fact of this pseudo weekly market being held at Grilling Abbots was duly registered in almanacks and chronicled in gazetteers, and all the inhabitants clung to it as an ancient and honourable institution that somehow, though precisely in what way no one could finally settle, enhanced the value of and gave consequence to their town. A rather wide street of straggling houses, some of the fine old red tone of years and years ago, others of new and pale brick, in colour like the

Considered as a select and

broad,

crust of a slack-baked loaf; an old Norman church some hundred yards in the rear of the High Street, its walls of the rugged, crumbly texture of the rind of a full-ripe Stilton cheese, and wonderfully freckled and variegated with alternate patches of moss and lichen: in the churchyard, shading quite a large group of graves, a yew tree, so dense that it looked quite black in the distance, and its straight, wide-spreading branches drew dark, opaque streaks across the view of the church: the George Inn "with good accommodation," &c., where Mr. Wilford Hadfield paused while the horses were changed on his journey to the Grange: the new Gothic school-house, built on part of the site of the old White Hart Hotel, which had been closed for so long-(the last proprietor committed suicide on the day the last stage-coach went through the

town for the last time: Grilling Abbots had been a famous place, and the White Hart its most noted hostel in the old prerailroad times, when a score of coaches rattled daily along the High Street)-the Rectory, completely covered with ivy, like an old warrior coated with chain-mail; the pump, the butcher's, the baker's, the blacksmith's-sum up these items, and you have Grilling Abbots, save that there has to be noted, in addition, a small white house-a little aloof from the town-standing in its own garden grounds, on the road to the Grange, and being the residence of Mr. Fuller, surgeon, &c.

There was no name to the house apparently; it was not known as Prospect, or Woodbine, or Clematis Cottage or Villa. Yet not a soul in the town but could point out the Doctor's, the pretty white building at the end of the town-where Mr. Fuller G

VOL. I.