“How pale you look, Miss Burton, and how tired. I am sure you will be better to take something,” and touching the bell she bade the servant who appeared bring some biscuits and a glass of wine. I was not hungry, but I reflected that the lunch would save the expense of supper at home, and I took thankfully the biscuits, and sandwiches and wine, which were served from solid silver and the most delicate of Sevres. To such straits of calculation had I come: I, who had just missed of being Lady Cleaver, of Briarton Lodge. I pitied myself even while I ate the sandwiches, with Lady Fairfax looking on and fathoming all my poverty, as I believed. Perhaps I did her injustice, for I think she really meant to be kind, and when I had finished my lunch, she said: “Archie’s mother, Aunt Eleanor, is here with me now—lives with me entirely. Would you like to see her?” and before I could reply, she stepped across the hall into the drawing-room, where I heard a few low-spoken words; then another step beside that of Lady Darinda, and Archie’s mother, Mrs. Browning, was at my side, and holding my hand in hers. Time and sorrow had changed her greatly, or else the silvery puffs of hair which shaded her face softened the cold, haughty expression I remembered so well, and made it very pleasing and kind. “Child,” she said, “it is many years since we met, and I am sorry to hear so sad a story of you. You are all alone in the world, Darinda tells me.” She had seated herself beside me, still holding my hand, and at the sound of her voice I broke down entirely. All the loneliness, and dreariness and poverty of my life swept over me like a billow of the sea, and forgetting the difference in our stations, I laid my head in her lap and cried bitterly. I think she must have cried, too, a very little, and that for a few moments she lost sight of the poor music teacher in crumpled feather and shabby boots, and saw in me only the girl who had loved her boy, and whom the boy was to have married, if death had not interfered. She was very kind to me, and made me tell her all the sad story of my life since father died, and questioned me of Tom, and then, turning to her niece, who had retired to the window, said: “Darinda, you did not positively engage Mademoiselle Couchet to read to me?” Her tone implied that she wished her niece to say no, which she accordingly did, while Mrs. Browning continued: “Then, I think I shall ask Miss Burton if she can come to me for two hours five days in the week, and read to me either in English or French, as I may choose at the time. I will give her a pound a week for the winter. Will you come for that?” and she turned now to me. “Come between eleven and one, so as to lunch with me in my room.”