A cablegram announcing Mrs. Grey’s death and Louie’s illness had gone to Merivale, where Herbert was spending his Christmas vacation. Prayers were said for the sick in the little stone church, where the judge’s amen was louder, if possible, than it had been when Mr. Grey died; while the book Herbert held was wet with tears for the girl who was to have been his wife, and for whom his heart was aching with a dull, heavy pain. He knew she could never be his. If she lived Fred Lansing would claim her, and “he ought to have her,” he said to himself; and that day he wrote to Fred, telling him of the broken engagement and saying: “I am human, and sometimes feel that I would rather know she was dead than the wife of another than myself. But that is selfish and mean, and I give her to you, knowing how worthy you are of her, and how happy she will be with you.” Other letters came from Merivale, and among them one from Nancy Sharp, wonderful in composition and spelling. She had heard, she said, that the Grey house was to be closed for the winter, so far as a genteel family was concerned, but that some honest, respectable person, or persons were wanted to live in the rear, and take charge of it until the owner claimed it; and as she was both respectable and honest, she had applied for the situation and got it, and was, as she expressed it, “happy as a clam,” with stationary tubs and plenty of room for her clothes to dry in the back yard. She did not suppose the Almighty cared for the prayers of an old scrub like her, but she prayed, just the same, three times a day—on her knees, too—that Louie might get well, and she felt it in her bones that she would, and come back some day to the old home which she would find in apple-pie order. “I don’t use the drawin’, nor sittin’, nor dinin’, nor best sleepin’ rooms, of course,” she wrote. “I keep ’em swep’ and dusted and aired, and live in the kitchen and but’ry, and bedroom off, and am happy as the day is long, for it’s quite a hist from White’s Row to this grand house.”