"No he won't," said Clam. "He ain't one o' them that have to try hard to make things go — works like oiled 'chinery — powerful too, I can tell you."
"What's going to be done?" said Mrs. Nettley meditatively.
"Can't say," said Clam. "I wish my wishes was goin' to be done — but I s'pose they ain't. People's ain't mostly, in this world." She went off with her dish of tea and what not, to her mistress up-stairs. But Elizabeth this time would endure neither her presence nor her proposal. Clam was obliged to go down again leaving her mistress as she had found her. Alone with herself.
Then, when the sun was long past the meridian, Elizabeth heard upon the stair another step, of the only friend, as it seemed to her, that she had. She raised her head and listened to it. The step went past her door, and into the other room, and she sat waiting. "How little he knows," she thought, "how much of a friend he is! how little he guesses it. How far he is from thinking that when he shall have bid me good bye — somewhere — he will have taken away all of help and comfort I have. —"
But clear and well defined as this thought was in her mind at the moment, it did not prevent her meeting her benefactor with as much outward calmness as if it had not been there. Yet the quiet meeting of hands had much that was hard to bear. Elizabeth did not dare let her thoughts take hold of it.
"Have you had what you wanted?" he said, in the way in which one asks a question of no moment when important ones are behind.
"I have had all I could have," Elizabeth answered.
There was a pause; and then he asked,
"What are your plans, Miss Elizabeth?"
"I haven't formed any. — I couldn't not, yet."