Lover or Friend. Rosa Nouchette Carey

and anxious blue eyes. Her black gown clung to her thin figure in limp folds; her features were not bad, and a little liveliness and expression would have made her a good-looking woman; but her dejected air and want of colouring detracted from her comeliness, and of late years her voice had grown peevish as well as plaintive, as though her troubles had been too heavy for her. Audrey had a sincere respect for her; but she certainly wished that Mrs. Baxter took a less lugubrious view of life. At times she would try to infuse a little of her own cheerfulness; but she soon found that Mrs. Baxter was too closely wrapped in her melancholy. In her own language, she preferred the house of mourning to the house of feasting.

      'Oh, I hope there is nothing fresh the matter!' repeated Audrey, whose clear-sighted sympathy was never at fault.

      She thought that Mr. O'Brien's genial face looked a shade graver than usual.

      'Come and sit down, Miss Ross, and I will be hurrying the girl with the tea,' observed Mrs. Baxter mournfully, for she was never too lachrymose to be hospitable, and though she shed tears on slight occasions, she was always disposed to press her hot buttered cakes on her guests, and any refusal to taste her good cheer would have grievously wounded her bruised sensibilities. 'Father, take Miss Ross into the best parlour while I help Hannah a bit.'

      And as Mr. O'Brien laid aside his pipe and led the way into the house, Audrey followed him, nothing loath.

      'Joe's been troubling Priscilla again,' he observed, as Audrey seated herself on the little horsehair sofa beside the open window, and Buff, a great tortoise-shell cat, jumped uninvited on her lap and began purring loudly.

      'Joe!' repeated Audrey in a shocked voice; she knew very well who was meant. Joe was the ne'er-do-well of a son-in-law whose iniquities had transformed the young and comely Priscilla into the meagre and colourless Mrs. Baxter. 'He has no right to trouble her!' she went on indignantly.

      'He has been worrying for money again,' returned Mr. O'Brien, ruffling up his gray hair in a discontented fashion; 'he says he is hard up. But that is only one of Joe's lies; he tells lies by the peck. He had a good coat on, and looked as thriving as possible, and I know from Atkinson, who has been in Leeds, that he is a traveller to some house in the wine trade. And yet he comes here, the bullying rascal! fretting the poor lass to skin and bone with pretending he can take the law of her for not living with him, and that after all his ill-usage.'

      'I am so sorry,' returned Audrey, and her tone said more than her words. 'He is a bad man, a thoroughly heartless and bad man—everyone knows that; and she must never go back to him. I hope you told him so.'

      'Ay, I did,' with a touch of gruffness; 'I found him bullying, and poor Prissy crying her eyes out, and looking ready to drop—for she is afraid of him—and I just took down my big stick. "Joe," I said, as he began blustering about her being his true and lawful wife, "you just drop that and listen to me: if she is your wife, she is my daughter, our only one—for never chick nor child had we beside Priscilla—and she is going to stop along with me, law or no law."

      '"I'll claim my own. There's two to that bargain, father-in-law," he says, with a sneer; for, you see, he was turning a bit nasty.

      '"And you'll claim something else as well, son-in-law!" I replied, getting a good grip of the stick; for my blood was up, and I would have felled him to the ground with all the pleasure in life, only the girl got between us.

      '"No, father—no violence!" she screeches out. "Don't make things worse for poor, unhappy me. Joe is not worth your getting into trouble on his account. Go along with you, Joe, and Heaven forgive you; but horses wouldn't drag me under your roof again after the way you have treated me."

      'Well, I suppose we made it too hot for him, ma'am, for he soon beat a retreat. Joe was always a coward. I would have hurried him out with a kick, but I thought it better to be prudent; and Priscilla went and had a fit of hysterics in her own room, and she has been looking mortal bad, poor lass! ever since.'

      'I wish we could save her these trying scenes, Mr. O'Brien; they get on her nerves.'

      'Ah, that is what her mother said! "Prissy will never have a day's health if we can't hinder Joe from coming to plague her"—I remember my Susan saying that. Why, it was half for Prissy's sake we gave up the shop. "What is the good of filling our purse, Tom, when we have plenty for ourselves and Priscilla!" she was always saying to me. But there, I was fond of the shop—it is no use denying it—and it takes a special sort of education to fit one for idleness. Even now—would you believe it, ma'am?—I have a sort of longing to finger the oats and peas again.'

      'But you are very fond of your cottage and your garden, Mr. O'Brien. Captain Burnett says it is the prettiest little place about here.'

      'Ah, I have been forgetting my manners, and I have never asked after the Captain, though he is a prime favourite of mine. Oh yes, he always has his little joke. "What will you sell it for, O'Brien, just as it stands? Name your own price." Well, it is a snug little place; and if only my little woman were here and I had news of Mat——' And here Mr. O'Brien pushed his hand through his gray hair again, and sighed as he looked out on his row of lilies.

      Audrey sat still in sympathising silence. She knew how her old friend loved to unburden himself. He talked to no one else as he did to this girl—not even to the Captain. He liked to enlarge in his simple way on his old happy life, when Prissy was young and he and his wife thought handsome Joe Baxter a grand lover for their girl, with his fine figure and soft, wheedling tongue.

      'But we were old enough to know better—we were a couple of fools, of course; I know that now,' he would say. 'But he just talked us over—Joe is a rare hand at talking even now. He can use fine words; he has learnt it in his business. I think our worst time was when Prissy's baby died and she began to droop, and in her weakness she let it all out to her mother. I remember my little woman coming into the shop that day, with the tears running down her face. "Tom," she says, "what have we ever done to be so punished? Joe is treating Prissy like a brute, and my poor girl's heart is broken." Dear, dear! how I wanted Mat then!'

      Audrey knew all about this Mat—at least, the little there was to know. One day, soon after Mr. O'Brien had lost his wife, and she had found him sitting alone in the porch, he had begun talking to her of his own accord of a young brother whom he called Mat, but to no one else had he ever mentioned his name. Audrey had been much touched and surprised by this confidence, and from time to time Mr. O'Brien had continued to speak of him, until she was in possession of the main facts.

      Thomas O'Brien had lost his parents early, and his brothers and sisters had died in infancy, with the exception of the youngest, Matthew, or Mat, as he was generally called. There was so much difference between their ages that Mat was quite a plaything and pet to his elder brother. From all accounts, he was a bright, engaging little fellow, and developed unusual capacity.

      'He was a cut above us, and people took notice of him, and that spoiled him,' observed Mr. O'Brien one day.

      Audrey, piecing the fragments of conversation together, could picture the clever, handsome lad learning his lessons in the little back parlour, while honest Tom served in the shop. But Mat was not always so studious: he would be sliding with the Rector's boys, or helping them to make a snow man; sometimes he would be having tea at the Rectory, or with his master, or even with the curates. One of the curates was musical, and Mat had an angelic voice. One could imagine the danger to the precocious, clever boy, and how perhaps, on his return, he would gibe a little in his impertinent boyish fashion at thickheaded, clumsy Tom among his cornbins and sacks of split peas.

      Mat did not wish to be a corn-chandler. When Tom married the daughter of a neighbouring baker, Mat was heard to mutter to one of his intimates that Tom might have looked higher for a wife. He grew a little discontented after that, and gave the young couple plenty of trouble until he got his way—a bad way, too—and went off to seek his fortunes in London.

      Tom missed the lad sadly; even his Susan's rosy cheeks and good-humour failed to console him for a while. Not until Prissy made her appearance—and in clamorous baby fashion wheedled her way into her father's affections—did his sore heart cease to regret the young brother.

      Susan