Over the round, pale, freckled face there passed a quiver of feeling which awoke Bram’s sympathy at last. The unattractive little woman had been rather cruelly treated from first to last in this affair of Christian’s marriage. The Cornthwaites, one and all, had thought much of him and little of her from the beginning to the end of the matter. And the offer to tend the girl Christian had loved so much better than herself had in it something touching, even noble, in Bram’s eyes. He stammered out that he would ask; that she was very good; that he thanked her heartily. Then, exchanging with her a hand-pressure which was warm on both sides, he left her, and went out of the gloomy house. Of course, Joan would not hear of accepting the kindly-offered services of poor Mrs. Christian. But when she heard of the welcome information which Bram had obtained from her she went half-mad with a delight which found expression in clumsy leaps and twirls and hand-clappings, and even tears. “And so it’s all reght, all reght, as we might ha’ knowed from t’ first. Oh, we ought to die o’ shame to think as we ever thowt anything different! Oh, sir, an’ now ye can marry her reght off, an’ we can all be happy as long as we live! Oh, sir, this is a happy day!” Bram tried to silence her, tried at least to check this confident expression of her hopes for the future. Not that his own heart did not beat high: if she was happy in this newly-acquired knowledge, he was happier still. The idol was restored to its pedestal. It was he now, and not she, who had a shameful secret--the secret of his past doubts of her. Bram could not forgive himself for these, could not now conceive that they had been natural, justifiable. He had doubted her, the purest of creatures, as she was the noblest, the sweetest. He felt almost that he had sinned beyond forgiveness, that he should never dare to meet her frank eyes again. In the meantime, as day after day passed slowly by, the news he got of her grew better, while that he received of her father grew worse. At last, two days after the funeral of Christian, he learnt, when he made his usual morning inquiry at the farm on his way down to the works, that Mr. Biron had passed away quietly during the night. His last words, uttered at half-past two in the morning, had been a characteristic request that somebody would go up immediately to Holme Park with a note to Mr. Cornthwaite. Bram heard from Joan that they tried to keep the intelligence of her father’s death from Claire, who was now much better, but who was still by the doctor’s orders kept very quiet. But she guessed something from the looks and sounds she heard, and before the day was over she had learnt the fact they tried to conceal; and then she spent the rest of the day in tears.