The Other House (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1878 edition. Excerpt: ...it was not possible for him to advance one step with her. Yet there was that in her face which told him to persevere. Now and then, in his unobtrusive way, he found some chance of doing her a good turn, but it was always done so quietly and simply that she was saved the humility of feeling herself placed under an obligation. To church she steadfastly refused to go, but when the plan of the mill-school was broached, to the surprise of everybody, and perhaps to none more than the rector himself, Debby added her name to the list of scholars, and, taking Jem by the hand, was one of the first to enter the room. The Reverend Harcourt had taken heart at this. Open opposition was less baffling to him than cool indifference. In the one case he felt that he had something tangible to overcome, and it gave him a new impulse; in the other he could have no clew for action. And under all his seeming embarrassment of manner and his little weak doubts of himself, there was a shade of stubbornness that, when he conquered grandly, Miss Clem was wont to call his firmness, and when he failed she willingly denominated as obstinacy. The rector had been interested in Debby's face as well as in her pitiful history. It was no small thing for a young girl, with a delicate, misshapen frame, to sit by a noisy loom day after day and to care for a little baby brother at night; and this was what Debby had done ever since Jem had been two years old, and her mother had passed out of the whirl, and noise, and weariness of this life into the quiet and rest of that other and unknown one. Mr. Chantelling, with his whole soul in his work, had become very dear to the dying woman; but the subtle change that he slowly watched coming over the feeble, fading mind, had no seeming...