Poor Sarah! At that moment Mrs. Stubbs was standing beside all that was left of him that had loved her so dearly during all the years of her short life.
"Pore thing!" she was saying. "Pore thing! We weren't good friends, nurse, but we must not think of that now; and I'll be a mother to his little girl just as if there'd never been a cloud between us. Pore thing, only thirty-six! Ah, well, pore thing; but he makes a pretty corpse!"
[Illustration: "Pore thing!" she was saying. "Pore thing!"]
Two days later Sarah's father was buried, laid quietly away in a pretty little churchyard two miles outside the town, beside the young wife who had died nine years before.
The funeral was a very unostentatious affair; only one cab followed the coffin, and contained Sarah and Mrs. Stubbs, the old nurse, and Jane, the untidy little maid, who, after the manner of her sort, wept and sobbed and choked, until Mrs. Stubbs would right willingly have given her a good shaking.
Sarah was very subdued and quiet, and Mrs. Stubbs cried a little, and would have cried more had she not been so taken up with keeping an eye on "that stupid ninny Jane."
And then they went back to the little hot, stuffy house, and had a cup of tea, after which the vicar of the parish called and had a long talk with Mrs. Stubbs about Sarah's future.
"I can't say we was good friends with him, pore thing," Mrs. Stubbs explained; "but when death comes between, little differences should be forgotten. And Stubbs and me will forget all our differences now; it's Stubbs' wish as well as mine. I believe in sticking to your own flesh and blood, for if your own won't, whose can you expect to do it? So Sarah and me is the best of friends, and she is going back with me to share and share alike with my own children."
"Oh, you are going to take Sarah," said the vicar, who had felt a great interest in the dreamy artist whom they had just left to his last long rest in the quiet country churchyard; "that is very good of you, very good of you. I have been wondering what would become of the poor little woman."
"Why, what should become of her?" Mrs. Stubbs said indignantly. "Her mother was Stubbs' own sister."
"Yes," said the vicar, smiling; "but it is not every lady who would at all encourage the idea of bringing up a child because her mother happened to be her husband's sister."