Mrs. Burfield was a pale-faced and pinched-looking person, hollow-cheeked and spare of figure, who in these latter days would have inspired a stranger with the idea that she was a rigid disciplinarian of the school founded by Mr. Banting. She looked as if all saccharine and fatty elements had been carefully excluded from her food; and yet, on the other hand, she had none of the muscular energy which might be supposed to result from a carnivorous habit. She was a depressing kind of woman, with thin locks of whity-brown hair dangling upon each side of her thin face, and thin garments hanging limply upon her scanty figure, and a thin voice. There was something in Mrs. Burfield’s appearance which called up vague images of drizzly days, and pattens, and washing done at home, and a man in the passage clamorous for a water-rate, and all the most unpleasant associations of poverty. She was a woman who prefaced every sentence she uttered with a sigh. She sighed as she admitted to Mr. Tredethlyn that her name was Burfield, as if even that fact were in some manner an affliction. She sighed as she told him, apologetically, that the house was full of lodgers, so she must ask him to step down into the little sitting-room below stairs. And yet, as she subsisted by the letting of lodgings, the crowded state of her house should have been a cause for rejoicing. Francis had some slight difficulty in conveying his long legs down the narrow little staircase, in which there was a breakneck corner, whence awkward maid-servants were wont to precipitate themselves headlong in company with an avalanche of tea-things; but he managed to find his way down somehow or other, and was ushered into a little faded-looking underground parlour, where all the furniture seemed to have undergone a prolonged course of Banting, and where the evidence of children’s habitation was untidily visible in every direction. The children were all at school, however, Mrs. Burfield told Francis with another sigh; though, as she added directly afterwards that they drove her next door to raving madness when they were at home, _that_ fact need scarcely have depressed her. “I had a governess for them some time back,” she said, unconsciously approaching the subject of Mr. Tredethlyn’s business with her, “and the young person was very useful to me in many ways; but things have been so dull, and lodgers so uncertain, and so close as to rent and kitchen fire, and such like, that I couldn’t afford to engage another young person, if I could have found anyone as reasonable and as willing as her, which wasn’t likely.” Here Mrs. Burfield sighed again, and to her surprise found herself echoed by her visitor.