The young girl spent the remainder of the day in her own room, not even coming forth to her meals. The next day she came down to the dining-room, but immediately after dinner retired to her apartment. She read no books nor newspapers, but sat before her fire hour after hour, silently brooding, and Peters with an unspeakable anxiety beheld the round gipsy face grow thin and pallid, dark circles form under the black eyes, and the light figure grow lighter and more slender, until she feared that the young mistress would soon follow the old one. In her distress, Peters had an interview with the housekeeper, and expressed her fears and anxieties. “A good wind would just blow Miss Lally away,” she said. “She’s pining, and the first we know she’ll be dead. What can I do?” “Who’d have thought she’d have loved the Missus so much?” said the housekeeper. “It isn’t that alone,” declared Peters, “although she loved Mrs. Wroat as a daughter might have loved her, but she’s had other troubles that I’m not at liberty to speak of, but which are pressing on her, along with her great-aunt’s death, until, I think, the double burden will crush her into the grave. She don’t eat more than a bird. I ordered her mourning for her, and when the shopman brought great parcels of silks and bombazines and crapes, she never even looked at them, but said, ‘Peters, please select for me. You know what I want.’ The dressmaker was in despair yesterday, because my young lady would not take an interest in her clothes, and did not give a single direction beyond having them made very plainly. I’ll go and see Mr. Harris about her, or else the doctor.” “What does a man know in a case like this?” exclaimed the housekeeper. “The young lady is pining herself to death, Mrs. Peters, and that’s the long and the short of it. This great house is dull and lonely to her, and the gloom of the funeral isn’t out of it yet. The young mistress wants change--that’s what she wants. Take her to some watering-place, or to the Continent, or somewhere else, and give her new interests and a change of scene, and she’ll come back as pert and chipper as any bird.” The idea struck Mrs. Peters favorably. She hastened up stairs to the amber room, and softly entered. Lally sat in a great chair before the hearth, her little shrunken figure quite lost among the cushions, her small wan face startlingly pale, and her great black eyes fixed upon the fire. She looked up at her attendant, who approached her with a swelling heart, but with outward calmness. “If you please, Miss Lally,” said Peters, broaching her wishes without delay, “I’ve been thinking that the house is so gloomy without the dear old mistress, and that you keep so close to your room that you will be ill directly unless some change is made. And I am sure I’d like a change too, for a week or month. And so I make bold to ask you to go for a month to Brighton.” The girl shook her head with a look of pain.