“Yes,” said Griffith, apparently struck by the brilliancy of the observation, “Dolly and I have said so often.”
“Let me see,” considered Aimée, “suppose we were to make a sort of calculation. Give me your lead-pencil and a leaf out of your pocket-book.”
Griffith produced both at once. He had done it often enough before when Dolly had been the calculator, and had made a half-serious joke of the performance, counting up her figures on the tips of her fingers, and making great professions of her knowledge of domestic matters; but it was a different affair in Aimée's hands. Aimée was in earnest, and bending over her scrap of paper, with two or three little lines on her white forehead began to set things down with an air at once business-like and vigorous, reading, the various items aloud.
“Rent, coals, taxes, food, wages,—you can't do your own washing, you know,—clothes, etceteras. There it is, Griffith,” the odd, tried look settling in her eyes.
Griffith took the paper.
“Thank you,” he remarked, resignedly, after he had glanced at it. “Just fifty pounds per annum more than I have any prospect of getting. But you are very kind to take so much interest in it, little woman.” “Little woman” was his pet name for her.
She put her hand up to her forehead and gave the wrinkles a little rub, as if she would have liked to rub them away.
“No,” she said, in distress. “I am very fond of calculating, so it isn't any trouble to me. I only wish I could calculate until what you want and what you have got would come out even.”
Griffith sighed. He had wished the same thing himself upon several occasions.
He had one consolation in the midst of his tribulations, however. He had Dolly's letters, one of which arrived at “the office” every few days. Certainly they were both faithful correspondents. Tied with blue ribbon in a certain strong box, lay an immense collection of small envelopes, all marked with one peculiarity, namely, that the letters inside them had been at once closely written, and so much too tightly packed that it seemed a wonder they had ever arrived safely at their destination. They bore various postmarks, foreign and English, and were of different tints, but they were all directed in the one small, dashing hand, whose t''s were crossed with an audacious little flourish, and whose capitals were so prone to run into whimsical little curls. Most of them had been written when Dolly had sojourned with her charges in Switzerland, and some of them were merely notes of appointment from Bloomsbury Place; but each of them held its own magnetic attraction for Griffith, and not one of them would he have parted with for untold gold. He could count these small envelopes by the score, but he had never received one in his life without experiencing a positive throb of delight, which held fresh pleasure every time.