“I fancy it must be time to go and take my ticket. If I had known how dark it would be, we wouldn’t have sent back the cab, Margaret.”

“I beg your pardon,—but, can you tell me how Mr. Hale is? And Miss Hale, too? I should like to know how they both are.”

He put up his book of notes in a very deliberate manner.

“Here’s something to do you good, miss. A letter from Master Frederick.”

“Bless yo’ miss, it will be a kind act; for she’s been but a sickly sort o’ body, I hear, and few hereabouts know much on her.”

Mr. Hale got hold of Higgins’s hand and shook it heartily, without speaking. Higgins looked awkward and ashamed.

“I’d take th’ risk. Worst they could say of me is, that I did what I thought best, even to my own wrong.”

“They’re not mine, and they are mine.”

“Edith says she finds the printed calicoes in Corfu better and cheaper than in London.”

Mr. Bell was stunned by the shock; and only recovered when the time came for being angry at every suggestion of his man’s.

“I thought you were hard to please, if this room wasn’t good enough to satisfy you, a bachelor.”

“I should like to have some little thing to remind me of Bessy.”

“Certainly. But I thought that it might be the effect of the antiquities of Oxford.”

Mr. Bell came up to wish her good-bye.

“Mr. Thornton. You know he had seen me close to the station; we had bowed to each other.”

Mr. Henry Lennox added a new and not disagreeable element to the course of the household life by his frequent presence.

“Oh! he is not very ill, or he would not think of Spain.”

“That’s the bonnet I got her!” said Edith, triumphantly. “I knew it would suit her the moment I saw it.”

“You call them ‘experiments’ I notice,” said Mr. Colthurst, with a delicate increase of respect in his manner.

“Not good enough! Don’t mock my own deep feeling of unworthiness.”