And she went on thinking and working. What comforting fleecy undergarments she could have woven for him! What ornamental braces he should have worn; and, in the sanguine hopes of that swelling urn of sweets, she designed—she never began them—a set of slippers, a set of seven, all beautifully worked in wool and silks, and lined with velvet. Sunday: white with a gold sun; Monday: dominating with a pale lambent golden green, for it was moon’s day; Tuesday puzzled her, for it took her into the Scandinavian mythology, and there she was lost hopelessly for a time, but she waded out with an idea that Tuisco was Mars, so the slippers should be red. The Wednesday slippers brought in Mercury, so they were silvery. Thursday was another puzzle till the happy idea came of crossing Thor’s hammer, which would give the slippers quite a college look, black hammers on a red ground. Friday—Frèga, Venus—she would work a beauteous woman with golden hair on each. She felt rather doubtful about the woman’s face; but love would find out the way. Then there was Saturday.
Just as she reached Saturday, she remembered having once heard that Sir Gordon had a set of razors for every day in the week, and the design halted.
Ah! if Sir Gordon would only have looked at her with that sad melancholy air of tenderness, how happy she could have been! How she would have prompted him to keep on that fight of his against time! But he never smiled upon her; and though she paid in all her little sums of money at the bank herself, and changed all her cheques, Mr James Thickens—as he was always called, to distinguish him from a Mr Thickens of whom some one had once heard somewhere—made no step in advance. The bank counter was always between them, and it was very broad.
“What could she do more to show her affection?” she asked herself. She had petitioned him to give her a “teeny weeny gold-fish, and a teeny weeny silver fish,” and he had responded at once; but he was close in his ways: he was not generous. He did not purchase a glass globe of iridescent tints and goodly form; he borrowed a small milk tin at the dairy and sent them in that, with his compliments.
But there were the fish, and she purchased a beautiful globe herself, placed three Venus’s ear-shells in the bottom, filled it with clear water from the river carefully strained through three thicknesses of flannel, and there the fish lived till they died.
Why they died so soon may have been from over-petting and too much food. For Miss Heathery secretly called the gold-fish James, and the silver fish Letitia, her own name, and she was never so happy as when feeding James and coaxing him to kiss the tips of her thin little fingers.
Perhaps it was from over-feeding, perhaps from too much salt, for as Miss Heathery, after long waiting, had to content herself with the chaste salutes of the gold-fish, dissolved pearls distilled from her sad eyes, and fell in the water like sporadic drops of rain.
Miss Heathery’s spirit was low, and yet it kept leaping up strangely, for she had been at the bank one morning to change a cheque, and with the full intention of asking Mr James Thickens to present her with a couple more fish from the store of which she had heard so much, but which she had never seen.
That morning, as she noted how broad the pathway had grown from the forehead upwards, and had seen when he turned his back that it expanded into a circular walk round a bed of grizzle in the back of his crown, and was then continued to the nape, Mr James Thickens seemed to be extremely hard and cold. He looked certainly older too than he used; of that she was sure.
He seemed extremely abrupt and impatient with her when she wished him a sweet and pensive good-morning, which was as near a blessing upon his getting-bald head as the words would allow.