This last Jeremy admitted to be a weighty argument.
“It is a precious rum sort of lawyer I shall make,” he said, sadly, “about as good as grandfather yonder, I’m thinking. By the way, how has he been getting on?”
“O, just as usual—write, write, write all day. He thinks that he is working out his time. He has got a new stick now, on which he has nicked all the months and years that have to run before he has done—little nicks for the months and big ones for the years. There are eight or ten big ones left now. Every month he cuts out a nick. It is very dreadful. You know he thinks that Reginald is the devil, and he hates him, too. The other day, when he had no writing to do in the office, I found him drawing pictures of him with horns and a tail, such awful pictures, and I think Reginald always looks like that to him. And then sometimes he wants to go out riding, especially at night. Only last week they found him putting a bridle on to the gray mare—the one that Reginald sometimes rides, you know. When did you say that Ernest was coming back?” she said, after a pause.
“Why, Doll, I told you—next Monday week.”
Her face fell a little. “O, I thought you said Saturday.”
“Why do you want to know?”
“O, only about getting his room ready.”
“Why, it is ready; I looked in yesterday.”
“Nonsense! you know nothing about it,” she answered, colouring. “Come, I wish you would go out; I want to count the linen, and you are in the way.”
Thus adjured, Jeremy removed his large form from the table on which he had been sitting, and whistling to Nails, now a very ancient and preternaturally wise dog, set off for a walk. He had mooned along some little way, with his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the ground, reflecting on the unpleasant fate in store for him as an articled clerk, continually under the glance of Mr. Cardus’s roving eye, when suddenly he became aware that two ladies were standing on the edge of the cliff within a dozen yards of him. He would have turned and fled, for Jeremy had a marked dislike to ladies’ society, and a strong opinion, which, however, he never expressed, that women were the root of all evil; but, thinking that he had been seen, he feared that retreat would appear rude. In one of the young ladies, for they were young, he recognised Miss Florence Ceswick, who to all appearance had not changed in the least since, some years ago, she came with her aunt to call on Dorothy. There was the same brown hair, curling as profusely as ever, the same keen brown eyes and ripe lips, the same small features and resolute expression of face. Her square figure had indeed developed a little. In her tight-fitting dress it looked almost handsome, and somehow its very squareness, that most women would have considered a defect, contributed to the air of power and unchanging purpose that would have made Florence Ceswick remarkable among a hundred handsomer women.