Oswald Cray laughed. "It would be just the contrary, Miss Allister. The longer you lived in it the less bewildered you would be." "Ah, yes," she answered; "use reconciles us to most things." She had laid her bonnet and black shawl on a chair, and was going noiselessly from one part of the room to another, putting in order things that Frank had disturbed since her departure. He had wanted a particular book, and to get it had displaced two whole shelves of the cheffonier. The coal-box stood in the middle of the room, and a fancy china inkstand, the centre ornament of the cheffonier, lay on a chair. But the room, in its present general neatness and order, looked different from anything Oswald had ever seen it. Sometimes there had not been, as the saying runs, a place to sit upon. Frank ill, perhaps careless, had paid little heed to how his room went, and his landlady and his landlady's young maid had not much bestirred themselves in the matter. When Jane arrived she had taken in all the discomfort at the first glance, and did not sit down until it was remedied. Frank's bedchamber was at the back, opening from it, and there was a small room--a closet, in fact--at the bend of the stairs, which was to be Jane's. Oswald followed her with his eyes, as she moved about in her simple usefulness. Perhaps he wished that he had such a sister to make his home a prettier place than it was made by Mrs. Benn. She was very small in figure, and the folds of her soft black dress scarcely added to its fulness. Her light hair was carried rather low on the cheeks, and twisted into a coil on her neck behind. Without her outdoor things she looked, if anything, younger than she did in them. "And so you went to Mr. Oswald Cray's, inquiring your way!" cried Frank. "I say, young lady, that's not the fashion of doing things in London." "May be not," answered Jane. "I daresay I and London shall not agree in our notions of fashion. Have you taken your milk, Frank!" "I should think so. It was smoked again." "Smoked!" cried Jane, turning round and looking at him. "It generally is smoked," continued Frank. "I think their saucepans downstairs must be constructed on the plan of letting the smoke in." Jane said no more. She inwardly resolved that neither Frank's milk nor anything else that he took should be smoked in future. "Why don't you sit down, Oswald. Are you afraid of Jane?" "Not very much," Oswald answered, looking round at her with a smile. "The fact is, Frank, I have some work to do at home tonight, and must get back." "Plans to go over?" "That and other things." "I shall soon be well enough to come out again and go to work," resumed Frank Allister; and his confident tone proved how firm was his belief in his own words. "Will Bracknell and Street take me on again?" "I think you will soon be out if you go on improving at this rate," answered Oswald, ignoring the last portion of Frank's words. "You look better this evening than you have looked yet."