Mrs. Piper wiped away her tears with the fine hem-stitched cambric that befitted her wealth and position, and applied herself disconsolately to her smelling-bottle. ‘What do you mean?’ asked Bella, all the pinkness fading out of her cheeks. ‘Why, surely you have heard?’ ‘I have heard nothing. Is it about Mr. Culverhouse?’ ‘My dear, he has left us. He has gone to Bridford--a horrible place in Lancashire, where they have small-pox every year. You might have knocked me down with a feather when Ebenezer came in and told me about it.’ Bella sat pale and speechless. Was it for this that she had schemed? She had slandered her familiar friend, sold herself to Satan, in the hope of winning this man; and behold! he was gone, and there was no more chance of winning him than there had been before she perilled her soul by this sin. For Bella knew that she had sinned. She was quite capable of doing a wicked thing for her own advantage, or to gratify her evil temper, but she knew that the act was wicked, and she had a lurking idea that she would have to pay for it in some manner in the future. Bella regarded sin as some people regard going into debt for present gratification; a matter to be settled in a remote future, and hardly worth thinking about while the day of reckoning is so far off. ‘Do you mean that he has really gone,’ she faltered presently, ‘for ever?’ ‘Yes, my dear, he has left us for a permanency. I suppose it is to better himself; but I can’t fancy anybody bettering themselves at Bridford, where the small-pox has been raging, on and off, ever since I can remember, and where they have cholera worse than anywhere in the kingdom.’ ‘How did you hear of it?’ asked Bella, with the faint hope that this piece of information might prove a fable. ‘From himself, dear. He wrote me the sweetest letter, full of comfort. But I don’t know what I shall do without him. His visits buoyed me up.’ ‘Other people will be sorry,’ said Bella, faintly. ‘Everybody must be sorry. He is a saintly young man.’ ‘When did he leave?’ ‘Yesterday morning.’ ‘And I never heard of it,’ exclaimed Bella. She was thinking how all things had looked the same, though he was gone. There had been nothing in earth or sky to tell her that the light had faded out of her life. The dull village street--with her mother’s vagabond fowls pecking in the highway--had looked not a shade duller than usual. She had passed Mrs. Pomfret’s trim garden, and had looked tenderly at the square unpretending cottage, thinking that those walls sheltered him; and he was far away. He was gone, and she had not known it. ‘He might have called to wish me good-bye,’ she complained, ‘after my working for his poor.’ ‘It must have been very sudden at the last,’ suggested Mrs. Piper.