"I shall surely go some day. I might have been travelling ere now, but I disliked to leave you alone, after this trouble about Dora." "There is no trouble about Dora, none at all. The running away o' the creature is a great satisfaction to me. I hate both her and her child." "Robert is breaking his heart about them." "And neglecting his business, and spending more money than he is making, looking for them. I might break my heart, too, but thanks be! I have more sense. Did I tell you the Crawford girls are coming to stay a week or two? I thought they would be a bit company to you. I suppose they can have the room next yours." "Christina's room! Oh, mother, I wish you would put them somewhere else. You have a spare room." "It is o'er near my own room. And they are apt to come home at night full o' chat and giggle, and get me wakened up and maybe put by all sleep for that night. What is wrong with the room next yours?" "I don't like any one using Christina's room--and they will keep me awake." "Nobody takes the least thought for my comfort." "Why did you ask the Crawfords? You know Robert hates them." "Robert is forgetting how to behave decently. He will at least have to be civil to the Crawfords, and that is a thing he has ceased to be either to you or me." "Robert and I understand each other. He gives me a look, and I give him one. We do not require to speak." "I wonder how I ever came to breed such unfeeling, unsocial children. If I get 'yes' or 'no' from your brother now, it is the whole of his conversation; and as for yourself, Isabel, you are at that wearisome reading or writing the livelong day. I'll need the Crawfords, or some one, to talk to me, or I'll forget how to speak. Now where will I sleep them?" "I suppose in poor Christina's room." "Poor Christina! Yes, indeed! I have no manner o' doubt it is 'poor Christina' by this time." "Mother! mother! do not spae sorrow to your own child. I can't bear it. I think she is very happy indeed. If she was not, she would have sent me word. It is poor Isabel, and it is happy Christina." "Your way be it." The next day the Crawfords came, and were installed in Christina's room. Mrs. Campbell was in one of her gayest moods, and she said to Isabel: "I am not going to live in a Trappist monastery, because Robert is too sulky to open his mouth to me. I'll be glad to hear the girls clacking and chattering, and whiles laughing a bit. God knows, we need not make life any gloomier than it is." For two or three days, the Crawfords had the run of the house. Robert went away, "on another wild goose chase" his mother said, just before they arrived; and his mother's words were evidently true, for he came home with every sign of disappointment about him. He looked so unhappy, that Isabel, meeting him in the hall, said: "I am sorry, brother, very sorry." "I know you are," he answered. "It was a false hope--nothing in it." "I would stop looking." "You are right. I will give it up."