"Miss Hallaton is quite well, I hope?" continued Picard, lifting his hat as if she were actually present.
"Quite well, thank you," answered Sir Henry, wishing him "good night;" but he was engrossed with his Colorados, and did not think of telling Picard that his daughter was going out of town.
CHAPTER XXVI.
IN SAMARIA.
The season, I have said, was wearing on, and, with waning summer, the heat increased to an intensity almost tropical. There are few parts of Europe where the atmosphere can be more suffocating than in London during dog-days, although while everybody goes about gasping, fainting, bewailing the temperature, nobody seems to dream of putting off ball, drum, dinner, or other festive gathering to a cooler date.
The July sun glared pitilessly down on square, street, and crescent, to be refracted with tenfold power from walls and pavements; the Park was a burnished waste, Mayfair an oven, and Belgravia a furnace. Cabmen plied in their shirt-sleeves, foot passengers put up their umbrellas, the water-carts disappeared altogether, and supply for once seemed inadequate to demand in the matter of beer.
If people drooped and languished in spacious drawing-rooms with sun-blinds, thorough draughts, fans, and all other appliances against the heat, what must that numerous class of our fellow-citizens have felt who live in stifling lodgings, stewing parlours over the kitchen and almost in the street, retired two-pair backs with eighteen inches of window, dusty carpets, heavy bed-furniture, and utter hopelessness of ventilation unaccompanied by showers of soot?
It is two o'clock in the day, the dinner-beer has been taken in and consumed, bare-armed artizans with short black pipes smoked out, are leaning and loitering at door-steps and window-ledge, doubtful whether to make holiday for the rest of the afternoon. A distant hum of children, like the drone of insects in a flower-garden, pervades the quarter; for the energy of childhood is irrepressible by atmospheric influences, but their hard-worked mothers are snatching a brief repose, and for a space, even their tongues are still. An omnibus has stopped at the corner public-house while the horses are watered, a costermonger is fast asleep in his barrow by the roadside, and a drowsy, dreary torpor seems to pervade one of those narrow, tortuous streets that wind in an easterly direction from the Marlborough Road, S.W.
In the second floor of a shabby little house, a window stands as wide open as it can be propped by a bit of wood, and from that window, with a weary sigh, speaking volumes of patience, suffering, and sorrow, turns Miss Ross, to take her seat once more by the side of a low sofa-bed, and watch a toss of black curls, a little wan, pinched face, with a dull aching pain about her heart, that grows and strengthens as hope fades, and dies out, day by day. Poor Jin's own face has turned very white and thin too. Her features are sharpened, and the black eyes seem large, out of all proportion; yet never in the days gone by, when they flashed with coquetry, or sparkled with wit, did they possess so rare a charm, as the soft and tender lustre that shines in them now.