CHAPTER XXI.
PLATO AND PAUL.
Phebe's nearest neighbor, except the farm-laborer who did an occasional day's labor for her father, was Mrs.Nixey, the tenant of a farmhouse, which lay at the head of a valley running up into the range of hills.
Mrs.Nixey had given as much supervision to Phebe's motherless childhood as her father had permitted, in his jealous determination to be everything to his little daughter.

Of late years, ever since old Marlowe in the triumph of making an investment had communicated that important fact to her on his slate, she had indulged in a day-dream of her own, which had filled her head for hours while sitting beside her kitchen fire busily knitting long worsted stockings for her son Simon.
Simon was thirty years of age, and it was high time she found a wife for him.

Who could be better than Phebe, who had grown up under her own eyes, a good, strong, industrious girl, with six hundred pounds and Upfold Farm for her fortune?
As she brooded over this idea, a second thought grew out of it.

How convenient it would be if she herself married the dumb old father, and retired to the little farmstead, changing places with Phebe, her daughter-in-law.

She would still be near enough to come down to her son's house at harvest-time and pig-killing, and when the milk was abundant and cheese and butter to make.