Mrs. Tarne, having been a real Pemberthy before her unfortunate
marriage with the improvident draper of King's Norton, was quite
one of the family, and seemed more at home at Finchley than was
the new widow, Mrs. Pemberthy, a poor, unlucky lady, a victim to
a chronic state of twittering and jingling and twitching, but one
who, despite her shivers, had made the late Reuben a good wife,
and was a fair housekeeper even now, although superintending
housekeeping in jumps, like a palsy-stricken kangaroo.
So Sophie and her bustling mother were of material assistance
to Mrs. Pemberthy; and the presence of Sophie in that house of
mourning--where the mourning had been speedily got over and business
had begun again with commendable celerity--was a considerable source
of comfort to young Reuben, when he had leisure after business hours
which was not always the case, to resume those tender relations
which had borne to him last autumn such happy fruit of promise.
Though there was not much work to do at the farm in the winter-time,
when the nights were long and the days short, yet Reuben Pemberthy
was generally busy in one way or another; and on the particular
day on which our story opens Reuben was away at High Barnet.
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