"I may come again to visit you, Mr. Gawtrey; and I pray Heaven to find
that you and Fanny have been a mutual blessing to each other. Oh,
remember how your son loved her!"

"He had a good heart, in spite of all his sins. Poor William!" said
Simon.

Philip Morton heard, and his lip curled with a sad and a just disdain.

If when, at the age of nineteen, William Gawtrey had quitted his father's
roof, the father had then remembered that the son's heart was good,--the
son had been alive still, an honest and a happy man. Do ye not laugh, O
ye all-listening Fiends! when men praise those dead whose virtues they
discovered not when alive? It takes much marble to build the sepulchre--
how little of lath and plaster would have repaired the garret!

On turning into a small room adjoining the parlour in which Gawtrey sat,
Morton found Fanny standing gloomily by a dull, soot-grimed window, which
looked out on the dead walls of a small yard. Mrs. Boxer, seated by a
table, was employed in trimming a cap, and putting questions to Fanny in
that falsetto voice of endearment in which people not used to children
are apt to address them.

"And so, my dear, they've never taught you to read or write? You've been
sadly neglected, poor thing!"

"We must do our best to supply the deficiency," said Morton, as he
entered.