"She bid me tell you that she hopes you will come in as often as you can of an evening. We are all sure to be at home then; the girls read aloud by turns, and mother thought that——"
"That it might improve my mind, and that it needs improving," interrupts Esther, smiling drily; "so it does. I quite agree with her; but not even for that object could I leave Jack of an evening; he is out all day long, and the evening is the only time when I have him to myself."
"You find plenty to say to him always, I suppose?" says Robert, with an involuntary sigh and slight stress upon the word him.
"Not a word, sometimes. We sit opposite or beside each other in sociable silence."
"How fond you are of that fellow!" says Robert, sighing again, and thinking, ruefully, what a long time it would be before any one would say to her, "How fond you are of Bob Brandon!"
"He is the one thing upon earth that I could not do without!" she answers shortly, turning away her head.
There are some people that we love so intensely that we can hardly speak even of our own love for them without tears.
"I should be afraid to say that of any one," says Bob, bluntly, "for fear of being shown that I must do without them."
"What have I in all the world but him?" she cries, a passionate earnestness chasing the slow languor from her voice, all her soft face afire with eager tenderness; "neither kith nor kin; neither friends nor money. I am as destitute, in fact, though not in seeming, as that girl that passed just now, shuffling her bare feet along in the dust, and with three boxes of matches—her whole stock-in-trade—in her dirty hand. But for Jack," she continues, in a lighter strain, "you might at the present moment be carrying half a pound of tea or four penn'orth of snuff as a present to me in the Naullan almshouses."
Robert looks attentive, and says "Hem," which is a sort of "Selah" or "Higgaion," and does not express much beyond inarticulate interest.