Frank Allister was sitting between the fire and the table, reading by the light of the lamp, when they entered. He was slight and short, with a fair skin like his sister's, and a long thin neck. The room was very small, as the drawing-rooms (as they are called) in these unpretending suburban houses mostly are. What with the smallness of the room and the heavy closeness of the Brompton air, Jane Allister had felt stifled ever since she arrived that day. Frank, without rising from his seat, turned round and held his thin white fingers towards Oswald Cray, who grasped them.
"Jane, where have you been? I fancied you went out for but a few minutes' walk."
"I thought I would go as far as Mr. Oswald Cray's, Frank, and thank him for his attention to you," was her answer. "He has been so kind as to walk back with me."
"But how did you find your way?" cried Frank, wonderingly.
"I inquired. But I suppose I was stupid at understanding, for I went out of my way. What a busy place London is! I should get bewildered if I lived in it long."
Oswald Cray laughed. "It would be just the contrary, Miss Allister. The longer you lived in it the less bewildered you would be."
"Ah, yes," she answered; "use reconciles us to most things."
She had laid her bonnet and black shawl on a chair, and was going noiselessly from one part of the room to another, putting in order things that Frank had disturbed since her departure. He had wanted a particular book, and to get it had displaced two whole shelves of the cheffonier. The coal-box stood in the middle of the room, and a fancy china inkstand, the centre ornament of the cheffonier, lay on a chair. But the room, in its present general neatness and order, looked different from anything Oswald had ever seen it. Sometimes there had not been, as the saying runs, a place to sit upon. Frank ill, perhaps careless, had paid little heed to how his room went, and his landlady and his landlady's young maid had not much bestirred themselves in the matter. When Jane arrived she had taken in all the discomfort at the first glance, and did not sit down until it was remedied. Frank's bedchamber was at the back, opening from it, and there was a small room--a closet, in fact--at the bend of the stairs, which was to be Jane's.
Oswald followed her with his eyes, as she moved about in her simple usefulness. Perhaps he wished that he had such a sister to make his home a prettier place than it was made by Mrs. Benn. She was very small in figure, and the folds of her soft black dress scarcely added to its fulness. Her light hair was carried rather low on the cheeks, and twisted into a coil on her neck behind. Without her outdoor things she looked, if anything, younger than she did in them.
"And so you went to Mr. Oswald Cray's, inquiring your way!" cried Frank. "I say, young lady, that's not the fashion of doing things in London."