“Uncle!” She put the letter into his hands, and then fell back in a dead faint on the sofa where she was seated.
“My dear child,” Mr. Aggland said, when the weary eyes opened once more, and rested on the paper lying on the table, “my poor Phemie, I must get you away; you must be kept quiet. These surprises and sudden tidings are killing you. Those men might have had more consideration, more sense. You must leave Marshlands.”
Then, as it seemed, speaking almost without her own will, Phemie cried out—
“Let me wait and see him—let me see the dead man alive again, and then take me where you will, away from this for ever. Let me stay,” she went on, with earnest pleading, “just to welcome him back, just to make him feel he has come home, and I will leave the next hour.”
That was her first prayer; her second was to leave immediately—to have everything packed up, and ready for immediate departure.
Then a new fancy seized her: she would have all the bills for the auction taken down; she would have every article of furniture put back in its place; the mirrors refixed, the pictures rehung, the curtains re-arranged; there should not be a chair out of place when the wanderer returned.
“My husband would have wished it so,” she said to Mr. Aggland, and Mr. Aggland gave orders to have the rooms they had already vacated put in order, the fatted calf killed, and the house got ready for the reception of the new owner.
He certainly inclined to the opinion that Phemie was a little out of her mind. He had long thought her odd—and now he was confident his niece was not merely odd, but also something more.
“Fainting and crying, and having the whole place upset on account of the return of a man whom she never could bear—for whom she never had a civil word!” Mr. Aggland muttered; but he comforted himself a moment afterwards by recollecting that—
“——Good as well as ill,