effectually as if he had not been five-and-forty, an old bachelor, and an attorney; and after half an hour of these slowly-growing, half-conscious, half-resisted thoughts, any chance that had brought the name of the dead woman’s lost daughter to his memory, would have called forth a very different “confound Phœbe Thomson!” from that which burst from his troubled lips in the house in Grove Street. Possibly it was some such feeling which roused him up a moment after, when the great cat came softly purring to his feet and rubbed against his slippers. Mr Brown started violently, thrust puss away, flung himself back into his chair, grew very red, and murmured something about “an ass!” ashamed to detect himself in his own vain imaginations. But that sudden waking up did not last. After he had filled his glass and emptied it--after he had stirred his fire, and made a little noise, with some vague idea of dispelling the spell he was under--the fairy returned and retook possession under a less agreeable aspect. Suppose _he_ were to be enriched, what was to become of the poor Christians? They were not very near relations, and the old woman had a right to leave her money where she liked. Still there was a human heart in John Brown’s bosom. Somehow that little episode in the street returned to his recollection; Bessie running across, light and noiseless, with her message. How young the creature must be after all, to have so much to do. Poor little Bessie! she had not only lost her chance of being a great fortune, and one of the genteel young ladies of Carlingford, but she had lost her chance of the doctor, and his new house and rising practice. Shabby fellow! to leave the pretty girl he was fond off, because she was a good girl, and was everything to her old father and mother. “I wonder will they say that’s my fault too?” said John Brown to himself; and stumbled up to his feet again on the stimulus of that thought, with a kind of sheepish, not unpleasant embarrassment, and a foolish half-smile upon his face. Somehow at that moment, looking before him, as he had done so many hundred times standing on his own hearthrug, it occurred to him all at once what a bare room this was that he spent his evenings in--what an inhuman, chilly, penurious place! scarcely more homelike than that bit of open street, across which Bessie came tripping this afternoon, wanting to speak to him. Nobody wanted to speak to him here. No wonder he had a threatening of rheumatism last winter. What a cold, wretched barn of a room! He could not help wondering to himself whether the drawing-room was any better. In the new start his long-dormant imagination had taken, John Brown actually shivered in the moral coldness of his spacious, lonely apartment. In his mind he daresaid that the Christians looked a great deal more comfortable in that little box of theirs, with that poor little girl working, and teaching, and keeping all straight.