"I wish that you would get rid of that trick of barking, child!" would be the almost angry exclamation of the father, when disturbed by the cough which had broken Amy's rest half through the night. If, when he drove his bundles of wood in a donkey-cart to the town, any one who knew poor Amy inquired after her health, "Oh! she's well enough," he would say. Or, if he could not say that, Mytton's answer would be, "The child's a bit pinched with the cold, but she'll be all right in the spring." But spring came, and Amy was not all right: the March winds seemed to chill her slight frame, even more than the hard frosts of winter. With a bitter spirit Mytton saw his pale, patient little girl gradually fading away. "If she'd common comforts, she would do well enough," he would mutter. "If she had a rich man for her father, she'd not live in a cottage which lets the wind in like a sieve, she'd be wrapped up in velvets and shawls, and have a score of doctors, and they'd soon get the little one round." Mytton fell into the common mistake of thinking that money could do everything, and this had the effect of filling his soul with malice and envy towards those better off in the world than himself, as if what the rich possessed were something taken from the poor. Mytton had the savage feelings of a man who thinks that he has been pushed out of a place which is his by right, and Amy learned to dread anything recalling to her parent what his grandfather's grandfather had been in the past, for it always put him out of humour with everything in the present. Mytton would growl at his hard fare, abuse every one above him in social position, or, if he were in a silent mood, hack savagely at his wood, looking as if it were by no means the only thing which he would willingly chop into pieces. Amy's brothers and little sister were so much accustomed to hear her cough, and see her feeble and sickly, that it never entered their minds that her illness might end in death. They had never known Amy strong, and the change in her was so gradual, that the children who were with her day after day scarcely noticed it at all. One March morning, however, little flaxen-haired May came to her sister with a perplexed and rather troubled expression on her round, chubby face. "Amy," she said, laying her thick sun-browned fingers on the wasted hand of her sister, "when Mrs. Gapp was here about the wood, what do you think I heard her a-saying to her husband 'bout you?" "What was it, dear?" asked Amy. "She looked at you sad-like and said, (she didn't know I was a-hearing,) 'She's not long for this world,' says she, and Gapp, he answered nothing, but he nodded his head so gravely. Amy, what did she mean?" A light delicate flush rose on the pale cheek of Amy, and a strange brightness came into her eyes. She raised them for a moment towards the blue sky, and then turned them earnestly, not sadly, on her young sister. "Did she say that?" asked Amy, softly.