In the meantime the remarks upon Esther vary from the wildly laudatory to the discriminatingly censuring.
"She is extwemely dark," says the dwagoon, as he would have called himself; "a thowough bwunette; must have a touch of the tar-bwush, I fancy!"
The stable-clock strikes four. Esther starts, as much as scullion Cinderella started at the chiming midnight. "I must go" she says, hastily; "I shall be wanted."
"Wanted?" he repeats, inquiringly. "And are not you wanted here? You cannot be in two places at once, like a bird."
"Mrs. Blessington will want me—I am her companion," she answers, colouring slightly. "I daresay you did not know it." ("He would not have been so civil to me if he had, I daresay," is her mental reflection.)
"Yes, I did."
"Who told you?—or have all 'companions' such a family likeness that you detected me at a glance?"
"Miss Blessington told me; and for the first time in my life I wished myself an old woman," he replies, sentimentally.
She laughs, a little embarrassed. She knows as well as he does that he does not wish to be an old woman, even for the pleasure of having her to carry his air-cushion and spectacle-case. But civil speeches are always more or less untrue, and none the less pleasant for that.
"If the frost holds," says the young man, suggestively—taking the small black hand which she has timidly proffered, not being by any means sure that it is etiquette for a "companion" to shake hands with lords' eldest sons—"If the frost holds, will you be inclined for another lesson or two? There is nothing like making hay when the sun shines—say to-morrow?"