"`But I don't think,' she whispered, creeping closer to his side, and drawing one strong arm around her as if for protection--`I don't think, dear, you will ever again say that the rich have no trouble.' "John Ross was silent for awhile, as he recalled the loss he had so nearly sustained, and the scene at the Hall, when the hope of two fond parents lay a-dying, and then he answered softly-- "`God forbid!'" CHAPTER FOURTEEN. PENGELLY'S WEAKNESS. These were the people the Hendricks wished me to go and visit, and in due course I went down to Elmouth to pass two of the most delicious months of rest and peace, growing stronger day by day, and finding ample food for thought in what I saw and heard. I had left London with a feeling that one great interest of my life would be for the time in abeyance, but I soon found upon mixing with the simple-hearted fishing and mining folks, that though the locality was changed, the pleasures and pains of people were just the same, and that care and suffering came to Cornwall hand-in-hand as often as elsewhere. One of my great friends here was Old Pengelly, the Ross's gardener, and often in a dreamy pleasant day have I sat in the old rugged garden, made in a niche of the great granite rocks with a view of the restless changing sea. Old Pengelly always had an idea that I was too weak to walk, and showed me the tenderest solicitude as he moved my chair more into the shade, fetched my sunshade or book; but his great delight was to kneel down and weed some bed close by me, and talk about the past, and no sooner did he find that he had hit upon some subject that seemed to interest me, than he would go steadily on, only rising up and straightening himself now and then, to get rid of a pain in his back. "Ah-h-h!" he would say, "don't take no notice of my groaning ma'am, that's my back that is, and all along of mowing, and digging, and sweating, and lifting about them lumps of granite stone to make the missus's rockeries; master don't seem to do it a bit of good." "Doesn't he, Pengelly?" I said, as I could not help smiling as I thought of the fine sturdy old man's age, for he was seventy-five.