Between Mr. Desmond and Mrs. Jerningham there was no tie of kindred--_that_ fact had long ago transpired; nor could Mr. Desmond be affianced to a lady whose husband’s existence was a notorious fact. And yet Mr. Desmond was obviously the especial property, the moral goods and chattels, of Mrs. Jerningham. Miss Alford knew something of Plato, but very little of that figment of the modern brain, entitled Platonic attachment. Friendship between these two persons would in no manner have surprised her; but, innocent as she was, her instinct told her that in this association there was something more than common friendship. If she had been blind to every subtle shade of tone and manner that prevailed between these two, she would have perceived the one fact, that Mr. Desmond’s manner to herself in Emily’s presence was not what it had been in the Islington lodging-house, where he had first come to her relief. The tender, half-fatherly familiarity was exchanged for a ceremonious courtesy that chilled her to the heart. Beyond a few kind but measured sentences of inquiry or solicitude when he first saw her, he scarcely addressed her at all during his visits of many hours. She sat far away from the chess-table or the reading-desk by which Emily’s low easy-chair was placed, and the subdued murmur of the two voices only came to her at intervals from the spot where Mrs. Jerningham and her guest conversed. At dinner Mr. Desmond’s talk was of that western London, which was stranger to her than Egypt or Babylon; the music which Mrs. Jerningham played after dinner was from modern operas, whose every note was familiar to those two, but of which she knew no more than the names. The books, the people, the places they talked of were all alike strange to her. She was with them, but not of them. The sense of her strangeness and loneliness weighed upon her like a physical oppression. Every day of Mr. Desmond’s absence she found herself thinking of--nay, even hoping for--his coming; and when he came she was miserable, and felt her solitary, hopeless position more keenly than in his absence. “Oh, why did I ever see him?” she asked herself. “I should have struggled on, somehow, at such places as Market Deeping, and might in the end have succeeded in my profession. And now I have given up all my hopes to please him--and he does not care! What can it matter to him whether I am an actress or a governess? I am nothing to _him_.” He does not care! This was the note, the dominant of all Miss Alford’s sad reveries. She toiled on patiently, always anxious to please her patroness; but it seemed to her very hard that in gaining this new friend, she should have so utterly lost that old sweet friendship which had begun in the days when she wore holland pinafores, and fished for bream and barbel with a wretched worm impaled upon a crooked pin.