'Away—yes—but where?'
'God only knows!'
And as she spoke the girl wrung her slender interlaced fingers, while the old minister kindly patted her head, as he had often done in her childhood. After a pause, Mary said, in a voice broken more than once by a hard dry sob,
'Our uncle in Australia would seem to have died months ago according to this letter, yet we only hear of the event now.'
'Yes.'
'And we have been living here in another person's house, though we deemed it our own—another person's, and not thinking of rent?' she added, bitterly.
'Yes.'
Mary thought the doctor took the matter somewhat placidly, and felt indignation mingle with her grief.
'And for the roof that covered us, Ellinor and I have actually been indebted for months to our cousin Wellwood, the cold-blooded son of a cold-blooded father, who died at feud with ours, and amid the whirl of London life never troubled himself about our existence, even when we were left as orphan girls upon the world. So we have been living here in dear, dear Birkwoodbrae in a fool's paradise, after all—after all!' continued Mary, with growing bitterness of tone and heart.
'"The paradise of fools—to few unknown," as Milton has it,' said the doctor, sententiously.