"My father and mother, I suppose."
"H'm! Well, you may tell them, with my compliments," he says, with a senile laugh, "that I think they might have found a prettier name to give a young lady, and that the old squire says so. The old squire says so," he repeats, chuckling a little to himself.
"I cannot tell them," answers Esther, half-crying. "They are dead."
"Oh, indeed!"
There his interest in the new comer seems to cease. His white head sinks back on his breast again, and he relapses into slumber.
Esther has had neither luncheon, dinner, nor tea—a fact which none of her companions appear to contemplate as possible. One bun has been her sole support throughout the long bitter day—only one, because all such buns must be bought with Mrs. Brandon's money.
"I daresay you would like to go to bed, dear, you look tired," says Mrs. Blessington, scanning rather curiously Esther's fagged, woebegone little face. "Travelling is so much more fatiguing than it used to be in former days, when one travelled in one's own carriage, whatever they may say. I remember," she continues, with an old woman's garrulity, "Mr. Blessington and I travelling from London to York by easy stages of twenty miles a day, in our own curricle, with outriders. One never sees a curricle nowadays."
"I am rather tired," the girl answers, with a faint smile, "and cravingly hungry," she might have added, but does not.
"Ring the bell for James to light the candles."
Weak from inanition, and with limbs cramped by long remaining in one position, Esther follows Miss Blessington up low flights of uncarpeted stone stairs, through draughty twisting passages, along a broad bare gallery, down more passages, and then into a huge gloomy, mouldy room—frosty, yet cold, despite the fire burning briskly on the old-fashioned-hobbed grate; a vast dark four-poster, hung with ginger-coloured moreen; a couch that looks highly suitable for lying-in-state on; an old-fashioned screen, covered with caricatures of Fox, Burke, the Regent, and Queen Caroline; and on the walls a highly valuable and curious tapestry, which waves pleasantly in the bitter wind that enters freely beneath the ill-fitting old door, giving an air of galvanic motion and false life to the ill-looking Cupids, green with age, that play hide-and-seek amongst vases, broken pillars and wormy blue trees.