"But I was not her visitor," objects the young fellow, stoutly—"at least" (laughing) "I was, but Heaven knows I did not mean to be! However, 'God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb,' and I obtained a great deal of information gratis upon a subject on which I really never had reflected as seriously as, it appears, I ought to have done——"
"Draughts and sandbags! I know what you are going to say," interrupts Esther, breaking into a childish lighthearted laugh. "We do hear a great deal about them; but I don't mind now; I'm used to it. I fall into a sort of waking trance when the subject is first broached, and say 'Yes' and 'No,' and 'H'm' and 'Oh,' at stated intervals; it does just as well as listening all through."
Linley laughs too. He is always glad of an excuse for laughing. Life has been to him as yet only laughable or smileable.
"Not a bad plan," ha says, commendingly; "but, really now, I flattered myself I struck out one or two very original thoughts on the subject of sash-windows; I said several rather brilliant things, only she did not seem to see them. I hoped she would have found my conversation so improving that she would have asked me to come again; but she did not do anything of the kind."
"They never ask anybody to Blessington," says Esther, feeling the string of her tongue loosed, and experiencing, despite herself, great enjoyment in having some one to chatter to, at whom it is not necessary to bawl, and who does not answer her monosyllabically with fade chilly smiles. "They are too old to care for society; like Barzillai the Gileadite, they cannot hear any more 'the voice of singing men and singing women.' They have the clergyman and his wife to dine on Christmas Day, and there their gaiety for the year begins and ends."
"And yours too?"
"And mine too. But I don't wish for gaiety," she answers, gravely, with an involuntary glance at her crape, which has grown very brown, and rusty, and shabby genteel.
"It must be an awful fate being shut up with those two old mummies," says Linley, compassionately, his pity for Miss Craven made vivid by his personal recollections of Mrs. Blessington's conversational power. "I had rather live in a lighthouse, or sweep a crossing, by long odds."
"So would I," she answers, drily, "if any one would set on foot a subscription to buy me a broom."
"You have Miss Blessington now as a companion, at all events," rejoins he, glad to fix on any bright spot in his poor new acquaintance's mud-coloured life.