"Who did they say she was?"
"Somebody's companion; old Blessington's, I think."
"Cunning old beggar! He knows what he is about, though he does pretend to be stone-blind."
"Old Blessington's companion, eh? I'm sure I wish she were mine."
"A sort of 'Abishag the Shunammite,' I suppose?"
These are some of the comments that the unknown beauty draws forth. Five minutes later, Miss Craven's scruples—such as never having skated before, having no skates, &c.—being overruled by her new acquaintance, she is sitting on the bank; and he, kneeling before her, is fastening some one else's unused skates on her little feet. A great desire for pleasure has come over her—a great longing for warmth and colour in her grey life, that looks all the greyer now in the contrast to the brilliant reds and purples of these strange lives with which it is brought into sudden contact. A great delight in the wintry brightness fills her—in the shifting, varying hues—in the bubbling laughter; a great impulse to laugh too, the spirit of youth rising up in arms against the tyranny of grief.
The low sun shoots down dazzling crimson rays on the mere's dirty white face. The swans and Solan geese are exiled to a little corner, where the ice has been broken for them, and where they have to keep swimming round and round to prevent the invasion of their little territory by the grasping frost. Girls that cannot skate being pushed about in chairs; "Whirr! whirr!" they rush along the smooth surface at a headlong pace. Men, with their arms stretched out like the sails of a windmill, advancing cautiously—first one foot, then the other—just managing to keep on their feet, and thinking themselves extremely clever for so managing. Other men and women flying hand-in-hand, from one end of the pool to the other, in long, smooth slides—as safe and secure as if running upon their own feet on the grass. Others, cutting eights, and all manner of figures, whirling round upon one leg, and making themselves altogether remarkable. One poor gentleman with his skates in the air, and head starring the ice; brother men laughing and jeering; pretty girls pitying—light laughter mixed with their condolences also. Eight people dancing a quadrille, chaîne des dames: in and out, in and out—right, left—go the moving figures, the cerise petticoats, the glancing feet. It is all so pretty and gay. When one has spent the best part of three months in weeping, when one has the quick blood of seventeen in one's veins, one longs to get up and run, and dance, and jump about too.
"There's no wind to-day," says Linley, turning his face to the north-east, whence a bitter breath comes most faintly; "when there is, it is the best fun in the world to get a very light cane chair and a big umbrella—to sit on the one and hold the other up; you can have no conception of the terrific rate that one gets along at."
"I should think it sometimes happened that the cane chair and the big umbrella went on by themselves and left you behind?" says Esther archly.
"Frequently, but that makes it all the more exciting."