While still undecided, her cab stops, and--all mean back-streets and sorry short-cuts being safely passed--deposits her and her box, bag, and umbrella, beneath the Shoreditch lamps and among the Shoreditch porters. Then an hour's waiting in the crowded general waiting-room, where all the chairs are occupied by fat men, none of whom make a movement towards vacating theirs in favour of the slender weary woman, who, with crape veil thrown back from her sad child-face, is holding her little numb hands over the fire, trying vainly to bring them back to life. Then more train; then a three-miles' drive in a fly, up hill and down dale, along snowy country lanes. And now her journey is ended: the fly has stopped at the door of a great, vague, snow-whitened bulk, that she takes upon trust as Blessington Court. The driver, having rung the bell, now stands banging his arms, each one against the opposite shoulder, in the rough endeavour to restore circulation. The servants are too comfortable--the butler over his mulled port in the housekeeper's room, and the footmen over their mulled beer in the servants' hall--to be in any hurry to attend to the summons. At length, after five minutes' waiting, a sound of withdrawing bolts and turning keys makes itself heard; the heavy door swings inward, and a footman appears in the aperture, blinking disgustedly at the snow, which drives full into his eyes. Esther immediately descends, and enters with the abrupt haste characteristic of extreme nervousness. "Will you pay him, please?" she says, with a certain flurry of manner, to the servant. "I--I don't know how much I ought to give him--how many miles it is." While the man complies with her request, she stands in the huge stone-floored hall, lit only by firelight, shivering with cold and fear. She peers up at the ceiling--of which, by-the-bye, there is none, as the hall runs up to the top of the house; at the walls, from which great life-size figures, dimly naked, glimmer uncomfortably cold. Anxious doubts assail her as to whether there are any rules of which she is ignorant for a "companion's" behaviour and deportment; she is not aware that she has ever seen one of those curious animals hitherto in the course of her life. Ought they to make a reverence on entering a room? Ought they to say "Sir" or "Ma'am" to whoever they address? Ought they to laugh at everybody's jokes?--not sit down unless given leave so to do, and not speak unless spoken to? So wondering, she tremblingly follows the footman as he opens the door of an adjoining apartment, and, announcing "Miss Craven," retires joyfully to the society of his compeers and his beer.