“Ay. It is a pretty yearly addition to us three;—two dropping together in this way: and, as I said, I hope you will enjoy it for many a year when I am dead and gone; as I am sure you deserve, for you have been a good daughter to me,—keeping the house as well as your mother did before you, and the books better than I could myself, leaving me free to attend to the shop. But, let us see. The room is half full of smoke still; and you will say that comes of my poking the fire. What have you got for Harry’s tea? The lad will want something solid, though he be a student. I remember his telling me last time that no folks are more hungry than those that have been a long while over their books.” Jane moved about like one in a dream, till, the shop-boy’s heavy tread having been heard in the passage, Morgan put her head in at the parlour door to say that Michael and a gentleman with him might be seen from the shop-door to have turned the corner at the other end of the Row. “’Tis a pity Patience can’t be here to-night, now really,” said the old man: “but she always manages to be confined just when we have a merry-making. ’Tis as perverse as her husband not choosing to buy a tontine annuity when he had the cash by him. He will find now he had better have done it. I wish I had thought of it in time to have made it a condition of his marrying Patience.—Well, Harry, lad! I hope you are come home hearty. What! You are not ashamed of your kin, though you have been seeing lords at every turn?” “How well Jane looks!” was Henry’s first remark, after all the greetings were over. “She is not like the same person that she was the last time I came home.” Henry was not the only one who saw a change in Jane, this evening. Her eyes shone in the light of the fire, and there was a timidity in her manner which seemed scarcely to belong to the sober age she had attained. Instead of making tea in the shortest and quietest way, as usual, she was hesitating and absent, and glanced towards Henry as often as her father and Michael joked, or the opening of the door let in a whiff of the scent of cheese and the et ceteras of a grocer’s establishment. Mr. Farrer remarked that Henry would find London a somewhat busier place just now than he had been accustomed to. London had been all in a bustle since the King’s speech, so that there was no such thing as getting shop-boys back when they had been sent of an errand. What with the soldiers in the Parks, and the fuss upon the river when any news came, and the forces marching to embark, and the shows some of the emigrants made in the streets, there was enough to entice idle boys from their duty.