"How inhuman of them to allow you!" he cries, indignantly, looking at the slender, fragile figure, at the childish face—so appealing, so touching in its utter paleness, now that he sees it without the temporary rose-flush of excitement.
"Not at all," she answers, simply; "they pay me for it."
"It would require very high pay to indemnify any one for the sacrifice of the best years of their lives to those two old fossils; I thought I was entitled to something considerable for standing the old woman for three-quarters of an hour the other day without uttering a groan," answers the young man, more seriously than he generally takes the trouble of saying anything.
"My pay is fifty pounds a year," she answers, frankly, "if you call that high."
Fifty pounds! It would not find him in cigars. He has thrown away five times that sum, before now, at lansquenet at one sitting.
Involuntarily his thoughts glance back over his own life—the luxurious sybarite life in which, hitherto, the heaviest misfortunes have been a too-prolonged frost, a disease among the grouse, the coming in second at a steeplechase, or the pressure of a heavy helmet on his forehead when on duty on a hot summer afternoon. Involuntarily, he compares this life of his with the existence of the slight frail child beside him: but the comparison is disagreeable, and so he stifles it, as he always stifles, on principle, every painful thought, as a sin against his religion of ease.
"Fifty pounds!—what a pittance!" he ejaculates.
"Do you think so?" she answers, surprised. "I think it is a good deal. Considering that they find me in food and lodging, and that I do for them only what any charity-school boy could do nearly as well, it is surely enough."
Her companion differs widely in opinion from her, but
"When ignorance is bliss
'Tis folly to be wise;"