"Not that I am aware of; Jack and I never show preferences for any one, nor does any one ever show a preference for us; we are a good deal too poor to be in any demand."
"I am glad of it."
"You may have the doubtful satisfaction of knowing that no one ever showed the slightest inclination to be your rival."
"So much the better; I don't want you any the less because nobody else wants you."
"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."
A body free from disease, a commission in a marching regiment, a methodistical, exigeante old mother. These would seem but a poor chétif list of subjects of thankfulness to Fortune's curled and perfumed darlings.
"Your acquaintance amongst old ladies must be extensive to justify you in that last statement," says Esther, with a smile.
"The best woman I know, then."
"It is a pity that when you went, like Coelebs, in search of a wife, you did not try to find some one more like her," rejoins Esther, piqued and surprised, despite her utter indifference to his opinion of her, at finding that, notwithstanding the imbecile pitch of love for herself at which she believes him to have arrived, he can still set a dowdy, havering, brown old woman on a pedestal, above even that which she, with all the radiant red and white beauty of which she is so calmly aware, all the triumph of her seventeen sweet summers, occupies in his heart.
"You are young and she is old," says Robert, encouragingly; "I don't see why you should not be like her when you are her age."
"I think not; I hope not," says Miss Craven, coolly, strangling her twenty-fifth yawn. "Without meaning any insult to Mrs. Brandon, I should be sorry to think that, at any period of my life, I should be a mere reproduction of some one else."
Another long pause. (Have we been here an hour yet?) The brown bees go humming, droning, lumbering about, velvet-coated: a high-shouldered grasshopper chirps shrilly: the dim air vibrates.
"Just listen to that cricket!" says Esther, presently, for the sake of saying something. "How noisy he is! I read in a book the other day that if a man's voice were as strong in proportion to his size as a locust's, he could be heard from here to St. Petersburg."
"Could he?" says Bob, absently, not much interested in his betrothed's curious little piece of entomological information; "how unpleasant!" Then dragging himself along the grass and the flowers still closer to her feet, he says, "Esther, mother hopes to see a great deal more of you now than she has done hitherto."
"Does she? she is very good, I am sure," answers Esther, formally, with a feeling of compunction at her utter inability to echo the wish.
"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.
"I often think that he is too good for this world," says the young girl, mournfully, picking an orchis leaf, and looking down absently on the capricious black splashes that freak its green surface.
Bob is a little embarrassed between his love of truth and his desire to coincide in opinion with his beloved.
Jack is not in the least like the little morbid boys and girls in his sister Bessy's books, who retire into corners in play-hours to read about hell-fire, to whom marbles and toffee and bull's-eyes are as dung, and who are inextricably entangled in his mind with the idea of "too good for this world." He evades the discussion of the alarming nature of young Craven's goodness by a judicious silence.
"I am such an expense to him," continues Esther, lugubriously, the corners of her mouth drooping like a child's about to cry—"what with clothes, and food, and altogether. Even though one does not eat very much every day, it comes to a great deal at the end of the year, does it not?"
"If you come to me, you would be no expense at all to him," Robert answers, stroking his great, broad, yellow beard (beard that will have to disappear before he rejoins his gallant corps in Bermuda), and looking very sentimental; yet not that either, for sentimental implies the existence of a little feeling, and the affectation of a great deal more.
"He would have to provide me with a trousseau and a wedding-cake, even in that case."
"I would excuse him both."
"Would you?" she says, jestingly; "I wouldn't; it has always seemed to me that the best part of holy matrimony is the avalanche of new clothes that attends being wed."
"You shall have any amount of new clothes."
"I should be an expense to you, then," she says, giving him a smile that is grateful and bright and cold, all in one, like a January morning. Cold