I chose the garden, and he led the way, and set me down upon an old oak bench, where the tinkle of the water through the flood-gates could be heard. “So you be come to paint the mill at last,” he said. “Many a time I've looked out for you. The young leddy down to Mother Busk's, of course. Many's the time we've longed for you to come, you reminds us so of somebody. Why, my old missus can't set eyes on you in church, miss, without being forced to sit down a'most. But we thought it very pretty of you not to come, miss, while the trouble was so new upon us.” Something in my look or voice made the old man often turn away, while I told him that I would make the very best drawing of his mill that I could manage, and would beg him to accept it. “Her ought to 'a been on the plank,” he said, with trouble in getting his words out. “But there! what good? Her never will stand on that plank no more. No, nor any other plank.” I told him that I would put her on the plank, if he had any portrait of her showing her dress and her attitude. Without saying what he had, he led me to the house, and stood behind me, while I went inside. And then he could not keep his voice as I went from one picture of his darling to another, not thinking (as I should have done) of what his feelings might be, but trying, as no two were at all alike, to extract a general idea of her. “Nobody knows what her were to me,” the old man said, with a quiet little noise and a sniff behind my shoulder. “And with one day's illness her died--her died.” “But you have others left. She was not the only one. Please, Mr. Withypool, to try to think of that. And your dear wife still alive to share your trouble. Just think for a moment of what happened to my father. His wife and six children all swept off in a month--and I just born, to be brought up with a bottle!” I never meant, of course, to have said a word of this, but was carried away by that common old idea of consoling great sorrow with a greater one. And the sense of my imprudence broke vexatiously upon me when the old man came and stood between me and his daughter's portraits. “Well, I never!” he exclaimed, with his bright eyes steadfast with amazement. “I know you now, miss. Now I knows you. To think what a set of blind newts us must be! And you the very moral of your poor father, in a female kind of way! To be sure, how well I knew the Captain! A nicer man never walked the earth, neither a more unlucky one.” “I beg you--let me beg you,” I began to say; “since you have found me out like this--”