formed a close friendship with the daughters of the vicar, Mr.
Browning, and Mr. Gibson found time to become very intimate with all
three. Hollingford speculated much on which young lady would become Mrs
Gibson, and was rather sorry when the talk about possibilities, and the
gossip about probabilities with regard to the handsome young surgeon's
marriage, ended in the most natural manner in the world, by his
marrying his predecessor's niece. The two Miss Brownings showed no
signs of going into a consumption on the occasion, although their looks
and manners were carefully watched. On the contrary, they were rather
boisterously merry at the wedding, and poor Mrs. Gibson it was that
died of consumption, four or five years after her marriage--three years
after the death of her great-uncle, and when her only child, Molly, was
just three years old.

Mr. Gibson did not speak much about the grief at the loss of his wife,
which it is to be supposed that he felt. Indeed, he avoided all
demonstration of sympathy, and got up hastily and left the room when
Miss Phoebe Browning first saw him after his loss, and burst into an
uncontrollable flood of tears, which threatened to end in hysterics.
Miss Browning afterwards said she never could forgive him for his hard-
heartedness on that occasion; but a fortnight afterwards she came to
very high words with old Mrs. Goodenough, for gasping out her doubts
whether Mr. Gibson was a man of deep feeling; judging by the narrowness
of his crape hat-band, which ought to have covered his hat, whereas
there was at least three inches of beaver to be seen. And, in spite of
it all, Miss Browning and Miss Phoebe considered themselves as Mr.
Gibson's most intimate friends, in right of their regard for his dead
wife, and would fain have taken a quasi-motherly interest in his little
girl, had she not been guarded by a watchful dragon in the shape of
Betty, her nurse, who was jealous of any interference between her and