Hilary, too. Often when Hilary's younger and more restless spirit chafed against the monotony of her life; when, instead of wasting her days in teaching small children, she would have liked to be learning, learning--every day growing wiser and cleverer, and stretching out into that busy, bright, active world of which Robert Lyon had told her--then the sight of Johanna's meek face bent over those dirty spelling books would at once rebuke and comfort her. She felt, after all, that she would not mind working on forever, so long as Johanna still sat there. Nevertheless, that winter seemed to her very long--especially after Ascott was gone. For Johanna, partly for money, and partly for kindness, had added to her day's work four evenings a week when a half educated mother of one of her little pupils came to be taught to write a decent hand, and to keep the accounts of her shop. Upon which Selina, highly indignant, had taken to spending her evenings in the school room, interrupting Hilary's solitary studies there by many a lamentation over the peaceful days when they all sat in the kitchen together and kept no servant. For Selina was one of those who never saw the bright side of any thing till it had gone by. "I'm sure I don't know how we are to manage with Elizabeth. That greedy--" "And growing," suggested Hilary. "I say that greedy girl eats as much as any two of us. And as for her clothes--her mother does not keep her even decent." "She would find it difficult upon three pounds a year." "Hilary, how dare you contradict me! I am only stating a plain fact." "And I another. But, indeed, I don't want to talk Selina." "You never do except when you are wished to be silent; and then your tongue goes like any race horse." "Does it? Well, like Gilpin's, 'It carries weight: it rides a race, 'Tis for a thousand pound?' --and I only wish it were. Heigh ho! if I could but earn a thousand pounds!" Selina was too vexed to reply and for five quiet minutes Hilary bent over her Homer which Mr. Lyon had taken such pleasure in teaching her, because he said, she learned it faster than any of his grammar school boys. She had forgotten all domestic grievances in a vision of Thetis and the water nymphs; and was repeating to herself, first in the sonorous Greek and then in Pope's small but sweet English, that catalogue of oceanic beauties ending with "Black Janira and Janassa fair, And Amatheia with her amber hair." "Black, did you say? I'm sure she was as black as a chimney sweep all to-day. And her pinafore" "Her what? Oh, Elizabeth, you mean--" "Her pinafore had three rents in it, which she never thinks of mending though I gave her needles and thread myself a week ago. But she does not know how to use them any more than a baby." "Possibly, nobody ever taught her." "Yes; she went for a year to the National School, she says, and learned both marking and sewing."