Following Miss Hilary's earnest advice that every thing should be fair and open, Elizabeth, on the very next day after that happy Whit-Monday, mustered up her courage, asked permission to speak to her mistress, and told her she was going to be married to Tom Cliffe: not immediately, but in a year's time or so, if all went well. Mrs. Ascott replied sharply that it was no affair of hers, and she could not be troubled about it. For her part she thought, if servants knew their own advantages, they would keep a good place when they had it, and never get married at all. And then, saying she had heard a good character of her from the housekeeper, she offered Elizabeth the place of upper house-maid, a young girl, a protegee of the housekeeper's, being substituted in hers. "And when you have sixteen pounds a year, and somebody to do all your hard work for you, I dare say you'll think better of it, and not be so foolish as to go and get married." But Elizabeth had her own private opinion on that matter. She was but a woman, poor thing! and two tiny rooms of her own, with Tom to care for and look after, seemed a far happier home than that great house, where she had not only her own work to do, but the responsibility of teaching and taking charge of that careless, stupid, pretty Esther, who had all the forwardness, untidiness, and unconscientiousness of a regular London maid-servant, and was a sore trial to the staid, steady Elizabeth. Tom consoled her, in his careless but affectionate way; and another silent consolation was the "little bits of things," bought out of her additional wages, which she began to put by in her box--sticks and straws for the new sweet nest that was a-building: a metal teapot, two neat glass salt-cellars, and, awful extravagance!--two real second-hand silver spoons--Tom did so like having things nice about him! These purchases, picked up at stray times, were solid, substantial and useful; domestic rather than personal; and all with a view to Tom rather than herself. She hid them with a magpie-like closeness, for Esther and she shared the same room; but sometimes when Esther was asleep she would peep at them with an anxious, lingering tenderness, as if they made more of an assured reality what even now seemed so very like a dream. --Except, indeed, on those Sunday nights when Tom and she went to church together and afterward took a walk, but always parted at the corner of the square. She never brought him in to the house, nor spoke of him to her fellow servants. How much they guessed of her engagement she neither knew nor cared. Mrs. Ascott, too, had apparently quite forgotten it. She seemed to take as little interest in her servants' affairs as they in hers.