“And let it be all the sooner, Phœbe, for the sake of those poor souls yonder,” continued her companion. “They can never do without you, now,—never, Phœbe; never—no more than if one of God’s angels had been living with them, and making their dismal house pleasant and comfortable! Don’t it seem to you they’d be in a sad case, if, some pleasant summer morning like this, the angel should spread his wings, and fly to the place he came from? Well, just so they feel, now that you’re going home by the railroad! They can’t bear it, Miss Phœbe; so be sure to come back!” “I am no angel, Uncle Venner,” said Phœbe, smiling, as she offered him her hand at the street-corner. “But, I suppose, people never feel so much like angels as when they are doing what little good they may. So I shall certainly come back!” Thus parted the old man and the rosy girl; and Phœbe took the wings of the morning, and was soon flitting almost as rapidly away as if endowed with the aerial locomotion of the angels to whom Uncle Venner had so graciously compared her. XV. The Scowl and Smile Several days passed over the Seven Gables, heavily and drearily enough. In fact (not to attribute the whole gloom of sky and earth to the one inauspicious circumstance of Phœbe’s departure), an easterly storm had set in, and indefatigably applied itself to the task of making the black roof and walls of the old house look more cheerless than ever before. Yet was the outside not half so cheerless as the interior. Poor Clifford was cut off, at once, from all his scanty resources of enjoyment. Phœbe was not there; nor did the sunshine fall upon the floor. The garden, with its muddy walks, and the chill, dripping foliage of its summer-house, was an image to be shuddered at. Nothing flourished in the cold, moist, pitiless atmosphere, drifting with the brackish scud of sea-breezes, except the moss along the joints of the shingle-roof, and the great bunch of weeds, that had lately been suffering from drought, in the angle between the two front gables.