"If I don't suit you, ma'am, I can leave this day month," she would say, crushingly; and then Joanna would hurriedly reply, "Please don't talk nonsense, Jemima. You suit me very well. But all the same you had no right to stand talking to the milkman for a quarter of an hour. Well, ten minutes, then," as Jemima, with some heat, protested against this; "and I will thank you to be more careful for the future." Waveney heard the whole history of Jemima's misdemeanours. Joanna had taken a fancy to the girl, and often mentioned her to her brother. "She has such a pretty manner, and she is bright and sympathetic. She is just the person for Althea;" and Thorold had assented to this. Joanna wanted her to stay to tea; but Waveney had had an excuse ready--she was only too glad to get out of the house. Her own vitality was so strong, and the interest of her own personality so absorbing, that she could not understand how any human existence could be so meagre and colourless as Miss Chaytor's seemed to be. "Is it because she is an old maid?" thought the girl, as she walked over the bridge. "If Mollie or I did not marry, should we ever be like that?" and then she added, piously, "Heaven forbid!" What was it Miss Althea had said that first Sunday morning, as they walked through the village?--that it always made her angry when people talked of empty, blighted, or disappointed lives, and that it was their own fault if they did not find interests. "I wondered at the time what Miss Althea could mean," she said to herself; "it sounded a little hard. But I have thought it out since. We must fertilise and enrich our lives properly, and not let them lie fallow too long; there is no need that any life should be thin and weedy. I suppose Miss Chaytor has had her troubles, but she is not without her blessings, too. I daresay her brother is very good to her. Oh, yes, certainly, Miss Chaytor has her compensations." Waveney had finished all her errands, but she meant to take a turn on the Embankment. The grey, November afternoon had a certain charm for her. It was not at all cold, and she wanted to sit down for a few minutes and watch the barges being tugged slowly against the tide. How mysterious they looked, emerging from the dark arches of the bridge! Already they were lighting the gas, and bright flickers were perceptible across the river. A faint wind was flapping the brown and tawny sails of some vessels that were waiting to be unladen; they reminded her of the tattered pennons in the chapel at Chelsea Hospital. And then she thought sadly of the dear old sergeant. He had died peacefully in his sleep about a week after her visit, and his last conscious words had been about Sheila. Mollie had seen the corporal two or three times, and one Sunday she and Waveney had gone over to the Hospital. The little corporal had looked aged and dwindled; but at the sight of Waveney he had brightened.