The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1887-06-04 00:00:00

death of the woman he had so dearly hived:- What
she had feared had come to pass. Before they had had
the or ders to remove from their unhealthy location
the cholera had come upon them, and it was the wife,
and not the husband, that had succumbed. Archibald
Ramsay had recovered to find himself a widower, with
a helpless baby of three years old on his hands, and his
life broken and shattered for all time, till he too should
go down into the grave, and understand, maybe, the
scrrow that had come upon his weary head.
'I shall come home,' he wrote. 'I could not live
out here without her. Hatherleigh—you remember
him—your old schoolfag is coming home, too. What
I should have done without hint in this awful time I
don't know. I think he has saved me from going
mad. He has gone through the sorrow, too—but not
like me. He knew it was coming. For months before
his boy was born the doctors told him what he must
expect; it would be either wife or child what would go
—most probably his wife, and so it turned out. He
has been a widower five years now, and his boy is a
fine little fellow, and a great friend of my poor mother-
less little Nellie. My darling told me what she had
written to you before she died. She was quite sensible,
and suffered nothing at the very last; and I know you
will do what she asked yon, old friend, when lam taken
too.' _ _ .

'Sixteen years ago,' the lawyer muttered; and it
seems but'yesterday that I went to meet them. And
Mrs. Jarvis—bah !—she does not come into any
memories where they are concerned. But I do think
she felt rebuked when she found that my errand to
Southampton was only to meet two sorrowful men
and two little children. And Ramsay's daughter
comes to me to-day, and Hatherleigh's son is going to
marry her; and they both look up to me as if I were
their father, and Mrs. Jarvis work at it as she will,
cannot undo the old bond Jarvis,
thatlasts even
in the grave.
Mrs. Jarvis as a most exemplary woman, but she
was austere, and made her husband's life a burden to
him sometimes by her temper, and the knowledge that
love had played very little part in her marriage with
the rising lawyer. She was aware that he had
passionately loved another woman, but she had seen
her chances of matrimony fading, as they will fade
from a lady not in her first bloom of youth, and with
a reputation for a temper and tongue of the sharpest
order; and she had angled for the handsome bachelor
with a persistence that left him no escape, and which
resulted in her becoming Mrs. Hedderwick Jarvis
and the mistress of a fine house and almost unlimited
means.

She would have picked a quarrel with him. If
possible, anent Miss Helen Ramsly and his guardian-
ship of that young lady; but it was a tabooed subject
in the house when the master of it was at home. Mrs.
Jarvis thought she ought to have had the bringing up
of the child of her husband's old friend, but he had
chosen to bestow her far away from Norwood, and
give her education into the hands of a genial, warm-
hearted woman, whose business agent he had been for
many years, and of whose abilities he had the highest
opinion. This Mrs. Jarvis chose to consider as an
insult, and to hold forth upon as such; and now that
the young per Eon's education was completed (the
lawyer's wife always spoke of her husband's ward as
the yc ung person ') she was not considered capable
of making a home for her. She was to stay with a
worldly family where the daughters went about to
plays and concerts, and had carpet dances at home,
and were otherwise steeped to the very lips in frivolity
and uselessness.
Mrt. Jarvis aired her grievances loudly, but her
severest strictures on her husband's conduct were
only as the crackling of thorns under a pot' in his
ears, and altered his determination not one whit