"Don't you? 'A poor thing, but mine own,' that is your motto, I suppose?"
A pause. An old woman, with a myriad-wrinkled Welsh face rides by along the road on a drooping-headed donkey; a large blue and orange handkerchief tied over her bonnet and a basket on each arm.
Esther watches her as she jogs along with a feeling of envy. Fortunate, fortunate old woman! she has no lover!
"I wish you would not look so happy," Miss Craven says suddenly, flashing round an uneasy look out of her great black eyes at her companion.
"Why should not I? I am happy."
"But you have no right to be, no reason for being so," she cries, emphatically.
"I have, at all events, as much reason as the birds have and they seem pretty jolly; I am alive, and the sun is shining."
"You were alive, and the sun was shining, this time yesterday," she says drily; "but you were not so happy then as you are now."
At the decided damper to his hilarity so evidently intended in this speech, a slight cloud passes over the young man's face; he looks down with a snubbed expression.
"I suppose I am over-sanguine about everything," he says, humbly, "because I have always been such a lucky fellow; my profession suits me down to the ground; I have never had an ache or a pain in all my life, and I have the best woman in England for my mother."