'How happy's the soldier that lives on his pay,
And spends half-a-crown out of sixpence a day!
Little cares he for the bailiff or bum,
When he pays all his debts with a roll on the drum.'
And so, for a time, Robert Wodrow passes out of our story; but a time only.
CHAPTER II.
IN LONDON.
Ellinor was thinking of Redmond Sleath—when was she not thinking of him!—during all that long, long journey from the North to London, and Mary had been painfully struck by her alternate nervous anxiety and dull, mechanical acceptance of her own attentions and care during its progress. She seemed at times like a somnambulist—one moving in her sleep rather than one to whom the journey should have been an excitement and a novelty after the long years of quiet and seclusion at Birkwoodbrae, hence the strain upon her overwrought nerves was ere long to bring a serious illness upon her.
A cab—a genuine London cab, one of those clumsy four-wheeled 'growlers,' peculiar to the modern Babylon and to no other place—cramped, damp, frowsy, far from sweet-smelling, and sorely perilous for ladies' dresses—had conveyed the sisters, both feeling somewhat scared and disconsolate, from the Northern Railway to the classic region of Paddington by day, and luckily for them not by night.
The long drive westward by the Euston and Mary-le-Bone Roads had seemed apparently interminable, and most weary after a long journey by rail; and then the architecture, construction, and material of the houses—brick, always and for ever brick—looked strange and foreign to their eyes, and so ere long they reached the Terrace, which adjoins Paddington Church. They had read of and heard a deal about the famous old Court suburb of Kensington, and thought the locality to which a chance had taken them might prove something like it.
Mrs. Fubsby, their landlady, whose address had been given to them by her nephew, Joe Fubsby, guard of the northern train (the chance above referred to), and hence their selection of such a singular place, received the weary travellers kindly enough. She seemed a motherly, well-disposed woman, but soured in disposition by past wrongs or sorrows.
She was about forty years of age, had some remains of beauty, and had seen better days and had other hopes (as usual with her class), all of which she was not long in hinting.
The sitting-room into which she ushered them, though scrupulously clean, had a mouldy odour, suggestive of the adjacent hideous churchyard; it looked small, poor, and shabby. Gaudy artificial flowers in vases of Derby spar were on the little mantelpiece, and some highly-coloured prints in Oxford frames were hung upon the walls.