Now that the four years were completed, the widower had to return to his desolate home and make the best he could of the fragments of peace and happiness left to him. Leam was nineteen: it was time for her to be taken from school and given the protection of her father's house. It went against the man's heart to have her, but he was compelled, if he wished to stand well with his friends, and he hoped that the girl would be found improved from these years of discipline and training, and be rational and like other people. Wherefore he came home one dry dull day in October, and the neighborhood welcomed him, if not as their prodigal returned, yet as their lunatic restored to his right mind. During these four years a few changes had taken place at North Aston. Carry Fairbairn had married--not Frank Harrowby: he had found a rich wife, not in the least to his personal taste, but greatly to his profit; and Carry, after having cried a good deal for a month, had consoled herself with a young clergyman from the North, whom she loved quite as much as if she had never fancied Frank at all, and spoilt in the first months by such submission as caused her to repent for all the years of her life after. The things of the rectory were much in their old state. Little Fina, madame's child, was there under Mrs. Birkett's motherly care; but as the child was nearly six years old now, the good creature's instinctive love for infants was wearing out, and she was often heard to say how much she wished she could have kept Fina always a baby, and, sighing, how difficult she was to manage! She was an exceedingly pretty little girl, with fair skin, fair hair and dark eyes--willful of course, and spoilt of course; the only one in the house who took her in hand to correct being Adelaide. And as she took her in hand too smartly, Mrs. Birkett generally interfered, and the servants combined to screen her; the result being that the little one was mistress of the situation, after the manner of willful children, and made every one more or less anxious and uncomfortable as her return for their care. Alick Corfield was the rector's curate. On the whole, this was the most important of all the North Aston events which had taken place during the last four years. Soon after madame's death and Leam's transfer from home to school Alick had a strange and sudden illness. No one knew what to make of it, nor how it came, nor what it was, but the doctor called it cerebral fever, and when the families got hold of the word they were content. Cerebral fever does as well as anything else for an illness of which no one knows and no one seeks to know the cause, and to the origin of which the patient himself gives no clew. It was a peg, and a peg was all that was wanted.