‘The last time I saw you, Miss Joyce,’ he said, ‘was the evening before you left home. And you thought England and London would be a new world. What do you think of the new world, now that you have seen them near?’
‘Did I say they would be a new world?’ Joyce sighed a little, looking up to the Captain with a faint smile, which made, he thought, a charming combination. She added, ‘I have only seen London in passing; but I’m beginning to think there is no new world, but just what we make it—and the same in every place.’
‘One of the old classical fellows says that, doesn’t he?’ said the Captain. ‘I’ve forgotten all my Latin; but you’re up to everything of that sort——’
‘Oh no; I am not a scholar. I just know a little at the very beginning. But I understand what you mean. It is something about changing the skies but not the mind.’
‘I wonder if that is what Mrs. Bellendean will do?’
‘Mrs. Bellendean?’
‘Oh, I forgot; it was your father to whom I was speaking; but you will know better all that this means. My father and his wife have left Bellendean—for good, do you understand, not to come back.’
‘For good! but I should think that would rather be for ill,’ Joyce said.
‘Yes, I knew you would understand. I didn’t myself, however, till very lately. I had no conception what she had done for the place, nor how much it was to her. And now they have shaken the dust from off their feet, and left it—as if I could have wished that.’
‘They would think,’ said Joyce, with an explanatory instinct that belonged to her old position—‘the lady would think that perhaps you were likely——’