Edmund listened with face intent and a pleased half-smile upon his lips. Mary moved noiselessly about, getting the tea-cups out of the cupboard and setting them on the tray with gingerly hand, so as not to disturb the literary party in the window. The reading was continued only for the space of some quarter of an hour. The story was a novel of ‘high life.’ No agent in it was of lower rank than a baronet; no menial less distinguished than a groom of the chambers or a majordomo was permitted to appear in its truly select and exclusive pages; the action took place in Mayfair, in Belgravia, and in the ancestral halls of dukes and earls. Manchester was alluded to by the refined author much as if it had been of about equal importance with Timbuctoo; the whole a very tawdry tinsel, pasted together in a very poor, second-rate manner. Myles read on and Edmund listened. Perhaps he was aware that the story was rubbish, but it took him into a world which by contrast with his own was beautiful: it spoke of something else than the Townfield as a pleasure-ground, grey factories, smoke and chimneys by way of a prospect. It pointed out another sort of existence than that led by him and his. Edmund had an intensely poetic temperament. Poetry of some sort, in real life or in books, he must have or die. It was not forthcoming in real life: Myles never read novels for his own pleasure, therefore Edmund had no beneficent hand to point out to him the shining treasures of real poetry with which our English literature abounds, so he had to rely on the titles in the catalogue of the Thanshope Free Library, and often received a stone instead of bread, in the shape of such jingling nonsense as he was greedily listening to just now. Myles was a great reader of politics and science. The romantic and poetic side of his nature had been left to itself; the soil, whether sterile or fruitful, had never received the least touch of cultivation--yet. He had some strong convictions on the subject of ethics, which will be best left undescribed, to display their results in his actions as circumstances put his theories to the test. There was something striking and uncommon in the appearance of all three of this group of brothers and sister. Mary was comely--a tall, well-formed, well-grown young woman, with the pale but clear and healthy complexion, dark eyes and hair of her elder brother--a calm, sensible face, not destitute of a certain still, regular beauty, but lacking the impetuousness and intensity of Myles’s expression. She sat knitting a long grey woollen stocking, and looked with a large steady gaze now at Myles, now at Edmund, whose face was equally sharp cut as his brother’s, but worn and drawn with pain and ill-health. Edmund was nineteen; Mary, two-and-twenty; Myles, six-and-twenty; another, born between them, had died an infant.