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It was as though a mountain-climber, braced to the strain of a hard ascent, should suddenly see the way break into roses, and level itself in a path for his feet. On his second visit he found the two ladies together, and Mrs. Ansell's smile of approval seemed to cast a social sanction on the episode, to classify it as comfortably usual and unimportant.
It never struck her that those could be the words of affection that Rickie would never have spoken them about a person whom he disliked. Nor did it strike her that Ansell's humble birth scarcely explained the quality of his rudeness. She was willing to find life full of trivialities.
His face was bright and resolute; the black curl streamed buoyantly on the breeze. "Good-bye," he responded, with a giant's grip of the hand. "Success to your hopes." Raphael darted away with his long stride. The sun was still bright, but for a moment everything seemed chill and dim to Esther Ansell's vision.
"You had the advantage of Esther of Miss Ansell's society." "Call her Esther if you like; I don't mind," said Addie. "I wonder Esther didn't convert you," he went on musingly. "But I suppose you had Raphael on your right hand, as some prayer or other says. And so you really don't know what's become of her?" "Nothing beyond what I wrote to you. Mrs.
"Bessy merely told me that Mr. Amherst had taken up his old work in a cotton mill in the south." As her eyes met Mrs. Ansell's it flashed across her that the latter did not believe what she said, and the perception made her instantly shrink back into herself. But there was nothing in Mrs. Ansell's tone to confirm the doubt which her look betrayed.
Hot food for one that must be for the geographical don, who never came in for Hall; cold food for three, apparently at half-a-crown a head, for some one he did not know; hot food, a la carte obviously for the ladies haunting the next staircase; cold food for two, at two shillings going to Ansell's rooms for himself and Ansell, and as it passed under the lamp he saw that it was meringues again.
Then she said, "What is all this nonsense?" and folded him in her arms. Ansell stood looking at his breakfast-table, which was laid for four instead of two. His bedmaker, equally peevish, explained how it had happened. Last night, at one in the morning, the porter had been awoke with a note for the kitchens, and in that note Mr. Elliot said that all these things were to be sent to Mr. Ansell's.
Ansell's eyes was to risk giving it a dangerous significance. "Bessy has spoken to me once or twice but I know very little of Mr. Amherst's point of view; except," Justine added, after another moment's weighing of alternatives, "that I believe he suffers most from being cut off from his work at Westmore." "Yes so I think; but that is a difficulty that time and expediency must adjust.
Langhope's lameness as to his daughter's nerves, had proposed to turn back with him and drive to Mrs. Amherst's, where he might leave her to call while the others were completing their rounds. It was one of Mrs. Ansell's gifts to detect the first symptoms of ennui in her companions, and produce a remedy as patly as old ladies whisk out a scent-bottle or a cough-lozenge; and Mr.
Ansell's voice and smile; and he only asked himself vaguely if it were possible that this graceful woman, with her sunny autumnal air, could really be his mother's contemporary. But the question brought an instant reaction of bitterness.