His neighbor, Samuel Nixey, had let his laborers do it for him, since he had kept his own hands and time for his artistic pursuit.

But he could afford this no longer, and the thought of the next winter's work which lay before him and Phebe harassed him terribly.
"Father," she said to him one evening, after she had been at Riversborough, "they are all going away--Mrs.Sefton, and Madame, and the children.

They are going Scarborough, and after that to London, never to come back.

I shall not see them again." "Thank God!" thought the dumb old man, and his eyes gleamed brightly from under their thick gray eyebrows.

But he did not utter the words, so much less easy was it for his fingers to betray his thoughts than it would have been for his lips.