Mr Brown was well known everywhere as a famous business man--not perhaps in that sense so familiar to modern observers, which implies the wildest flights of speculation, and such skilful arts of bookmaking as ruin themselves by their very cleverness. Mr Brown did not allow the grass to grow below his feet; his advertisements perpetually led off that list of advertisements in the Times which convey so many skeleton romances to a curious public. All over the country people began to entertain guesses about that Phœbe Thomson who was to hear something so much to her own advantage; and Phœbe Thomsons answered to the call through all the breadth of the three kingdoms. Mr Brown had a detective officer in his pay for the whole year. He made journeys himself, and sent this secret agent on innumerable journeys. He discovered the regiment, a detachment of which had been stationed at the Isle of Man during the year 1808; he went to the island; he left no means untried of finding out this hypothetical person. Nearer at home, Mr Brown had made short work of Nancy, who, too deeply mortified by the failure of her hopes to remain in Carlingford, had returned to her native place with a moderate pension, her own savings, and her mistress’s old clothes, not so badly satisfied on the whole, but still a defeated woman. While poor Mrs Christian, compelled by sore dint of time and trouble to give up her forlorn hope of getting justice done her, and reclaiming the wealth that had been so nearly hers from the hands of Mr Brown, was half reconciled to him by his summary dealings with her special enemy. A whole year had passed, and other things had happened at Carlingford. Everybody now did not talk of Mrs Thomson’s extraordinary will, and John Brown’s wonderful chance of coming into twenty thousand pounds. People had even given over noting that the young doctor had thought better of that foolish fancy of his for Bessie Christian. All the persons in this little drama had relapsed into the shade. It was a very heavy shadow so far as Grove Street was concerned. The little pupils had fallen off, collected again, fallen off once more. If the cheerful glimmer of firelight had never failed in the sick-room--if the helpless old father, sitting in that calm of infirmity and age, making comments which would have irritated his careful attendants beyond bearing if they had not been used to them, never missed anything of his usual comforts--nobody knew at what cost these comforts were bought. But there did come a crisis in which patience and courage, and the steadfast soul which had carried the young bread-winner through the drear monotony of that year, failed her at last. Her mother, who was of a different temper from Bessie, and had gone through a thousand despairs and revivals before the young creature at her side began to droop, saw that the time had come when everything was at stake; and, more reluctantly and slowly, Bessie herself came to see it.