Mrs. Brandon is an old woman, with a smooth, holy face, and a villainous black poke bonnet: she kisses Esther, and the Misses Brandon likewise come forward and inflict a prim sisterly salute with their thin old-maid lips, on the velvet rose-leaf of her cheek. They had never kissed her before, and she felt as if the manacles were being fastened round her wrists, and the gyves about her ankles. She longs to cry out and say, "What are you all about? you are quite mistaken, every one of you; Mrs. Brandon, I am not your daughter; Miss Bessy, I am not your sister; I don't want to be: take back those kisses of yours, if you please, if they mean that!" Had she been alone with Robert, she would probably have said this; have said it without much difficulty, but now the words seemed infinitely, impossibly hard to frame. There is upon her the shyness of a young woman with an old one; the shyness of one against three. She feels, too, that it seems ungracious, churlish, when they are so glad to take her in to themselves, to adopt her as their own, not to be very glad too. When a person says to one, if not in words, yet with looks and gestures, "Our people shall be thy people, and our God thy God," it is not easy for a plastic, gracious nature to say "No, they shall not!" however little they may relish the arrangement. So, in her muteness, Esther accepts the Brandon God and people as hers. Wordless and demure, she sits down on a little low seat as far removed as may be from Robert. Esther will, no doubt, be an ugly old woman; she makes rather an ugly photograph; but who can deny that she is a delicious bit of colour as she sits there right in the eye of the morning sun, and not at all afraid of his strict scrutiny? So many women, now-a-days, are neutral-tinted, drabbish, greyish, as if the colours that God painted with were not fast, but faded, like Reynolds'. Esther's colouring is as distinct, as decided, as clean and clear as that on a flower's petal or a butterfly's wing. Nobody speaks, except the clock with the short-waisted Minerva on it, and it does not say anything particularly original. Then the old woman bends towards the young one, and says in a kind, low voice, "You see Robert has told us his news, my dear." There is flowing in through the French window a broad river of yellow light from the great fountain in the sky; it is deluging Mrs. Brandon's bonnet and Esther's hair. The bonnet is black, and the hair is black; but there are blacks and blacks. The May grass is green, and a beer bottle is green; but the resemblance between the two is not striking. Esther has not the remotest idea what answer to make; so she chooses one of the shortest words she knows of, and says "Yes!" half-assentingly, half-interrogatively. "And we could not rest till we came and told you what good news we thought it," pursues the old lady, encouragingly.