Agatha had never thought of this, indeed she did not want to think. Her heart was brimming with charity. She longed to empty it out in a torrent of benefactions, to which even Anne Valery's constant stream of good deeds appeared measured and slow. Elizabeth watched her with a strange piercing expression--Elizabeth, who from her silent nest seemed to behold all things clearer, like a spirit sitting halfway in upper air, to whose passionless wide vision distant mazes take form and proportion. Often, there was something almost supernatural in Elizabeth and her attentive eyes. “My dear,” she said at last, when Agatha paused for a response to her own enthusiasm, “Man proposes--God disposes! Go and talk over these things with your husband first.” Agatha went. She met Nathanael on the staircase, going up to their own room. “Ah; is it you? I am so glad. Come and tell me what has been done about the poor miner.” “He is gone. I have sent him back to Cornwall.” “What, so soon? Not to starve at that Wheal--Wheal something or other--I always forget the name?” “Do forget it. Don't let the matter trouble my little wife. Let her run down-stairs and think of something else.” He patted her head with assumed carelessness, and was passing her by; but she stopped him. “Ah! there it is--I am always to be a child! I am to run down-stairs and think of something else, while you go and shut yourself up to ponder over this affair. But I will not be shut out; I will go with you;--come!” In playful force she drew him to their room, and closed the door. “Now, sit down, and tell me the whole story. Why, how grave and pale it has made you look! But never mind; we'll find out a plan to help the poor people.” He gave some inarticulate assent, which checked her by its coldness, sank on the chair she placed, and folded his fingers tightly in one another, so that Agatha could not even strengthen herself in the bold projects she was about to communicate, by stealing her own into her husband's hand. However, she placed herself on the floor at his feet, in the attitude of a Circassian beauty; or--she accidentally thought--not unlike a Circassian slave. “Begin, please! I must hear about these mines.” “I doubt if you could understand,--at least with the few explanations I am able to give you at present.” “Nevertheless, I'll try. Why are the poor men starving in this way?” “You heard but now. Because the mines were first opened on a speculation, worked carelessly--dishonestly I fear--till the speculator's money failed, and the vein stopped. Then the miners being thrown out of employ were reduced to great distress, as this man tells me.” “But why should he have come here after your father?” “And,” continued Nathanael, in a quick and rather inexplicable correlative, “the mines were lately sold as waste land. Anne Valery bought them.” “Why did she do that?”