Brandon has been busy all day with Jack's lawyer: returning in the afternoon, he finds Esther sitting on the study window-ledge, on which she and Jack used to sit on summer nights, and watch the little feathery, plumy clouds sail along the sky's sapphire sea; used to watch
"The large white stars rise one by one,"
and speculate who lived in them, and what they were made of. Jack has entered into the ranks of the initiated, but she still sits and wonders.
"Come out for a stroll, Essie," says the young man, stooping over her till his yellow beard, curly as a bull's forehead, almost touches her dark, drooped head.
"If you like," she answers, indifferently; and so drags herself slowly up, and walks away heavily to get ready.
"Where shall we go?" inquires he, as they stand at the farmyard gate. The callow Cochin chickens have grown up, and are stalking about, in all the dignity of long, yellow legs and adolescence, under the frames of the corn-ricks, "Where shall we go?—to see my mother?"
"That would be returning her visit almost too promptly," answers the young girl, with a weary smile; "it is not more than half an hour since they left this house."
"They! Were my sisters here too, then?" inquires Bob, quickly; his confidence in his sisters' infallibility as to words and actions not being so perfect as in his mamma's. "I hope their coming did not worry you much."
"Nothing worries me now," she answers, calmly; "I defy anything to worry, or anger, or frighten me. Do you remember a line of Mrs. Barrett Browning's? Oh no, by-the-bye, you never read poetry—
"'Fallen too low for special fear.'