Certainly he believed all that Phebe said to him.

God loved her, cared for her, ordered her life; yet he, her father, could not reconcile himself to the idea of her being left penniless and friendless in the cold and cruel world.

He could have left her more peacefully in God's hands if she had those six hundred pounds of his earnings to inherit.
The sad winter wore slowly away.

Now and then the table-land around them put on its white familiar livery of snow, and old Marlowe's dim eyes gazed at it through his lattice window, recollecting the winters of long years ago, when neither snow nor storm came amiss to him.

But the slight sprinkling soon melted away, and the dun-colored fog and cloudy curtain shut them in again, cutting them off from the rest of the world as if their little dwelling was the ark stranded on the hill's summit amid a waste of water..