“‘Have patience,’ I said; ‘have patience, it will all come right, she has no hand in it.’ He threw me off as if I had been a child, and the last I saw of him was his head above the people that had gathered round the court. I walked quietly on, and when I entered the house there stood Mary, white as a sheet, while Mr. and Mrs. Considine were doing all manner of civilities to the young man, who was acting the gentleman, smiling and bowing and twisting a seal—set the likes of him up with a seal—at the end of his watch-chain—a seal which was big enough for the rapper of a hall-door—and dangling a ring he had on his starved, crooked, little finger, right in the foolish old man’s eyes. ‘And wont you sit down, Mr. Henry Highley,’ said one, ‘and wont you stop for _tay_,’ says the other. And seeing me staring at him, Mrs. Considine adds— “‘A young lady-friend of my daughter’s, who stops mostly with a friend of her own at the West-end.’ “Now, aunt, I didn’t care about her calling me a lady, but I couldn’t bear being put on a level with my mistress, a rale lady born. “And I said, ‘my mistress lives at the West-end, sure enough.’ Mrs. Considine frowned at me, and Mary left the little room. “‘Come back, Mary,’ called her father; ‘bring her back,’ whispered her mother. “It was well I followed her—she had fainted: I laid her on the bed, and did all I could for her. When she was coming to herself, she put up her hand—I thought, maybe, to feel for the locket, but that might be my fancy. It was long before I could make her deaf father understand that she was too ill to return, but her mother saw it at once, and after we put her to bed, and she drank a cup of tea, and said she thought to go to sleep, we left her—I staid a few minutes below, though I saw the old man wished me gone. And now, aunt, don’t be angry, but I think I could have found it in my heart to give that _Cub-een_ of a fellow, a glass of poison: his face was not only vicious, sharp, and thin, and active, like a rat’s—but he had his eyes every where. I saw him weigh the tea-spoon on his fore-finger in a balancing sort of fashion, and then look at the mark to be sure it was silver: he drew the old people on in such a way, getting more out of Mr. Considine than ever was got out of him before, as to his property and means—getting him to talk of interest and bankers, and the like: and the old man cursed the savings banks, and said money was never so safe as in one’s own house, and that the best of all banks for him was his leather bag—the more I looked at Mr. Henry Highley, the more I hated him, and sorry enough was I to know that young Considine had gone a journey for his employer, and was not to the fore, when most wanted.