"A good deal; lately, I have generally ended the day without any voice at all. I don't mind making short remarks at the top of my voice, but shouting out six columns of the _Times_, as is daily my pleasing task, is rather fatiguing." "How inhuman of them to allow you!" he cries, indignantly, looking at the slender, fragile figure, at the childish face--so appealing, so touching in its utter paleness, now that he sees it without the temporary rose-flush of excitement. "Not at all," she answers, simply; "they pay me for it." "It would require very high pay to indemnify any one for the sacrifice of the best years of their lives to those two old fossils; I thought I was entitled to something considerable for standing the old woman for three-quarters of an hour the other day without uttering a groan," answers the young man, more seriously than he generally takes the trouble of saying anything. "My pay is fifty pounds a year," she answers, frankly, "if you call that high." Fifty pounds! It would not find him in cigars. He has thrown away five times that sum, before now, at lansquenet at one sitting. Involuntarily his thoughts glance back over his own life--the luxurious sybarite life in which, hitherto, the heaviest misfortunes have been a too-prolonged frost, a disease among the grouse, the coming in second at a steeplechase, or the pressure of a heavy helmet on his forehead when on duty on a hot summer afternoon. Involuntarily, he compares this life of his with the existence of the slight frail child beside him: but the comparison is disagreeable, and so he stifles it, as he always stifles, on principle, every painful thought, as a sin against his religion of ease. "Fifty pounds!--what a pittance!" he ejaculates. "Do you think so?" she answers, surprised. "I think it is a good deal. Considering that they find me in food and lodging, and that I do for them only what any charity-school boy could do nearly as well, it is surely enough." Her companion differs widely in opinion from her, but "When ignorance is bliss 'Tis folly to be wise;" and reflecting that it is fortunate that she is satisfied, on whatever insufficient grounds her satisfaction rests, he drops the subject, and continues his catechism on a different head. "Have you no amusement of any kind_--none?_" "Oh dear, yes! We drive into Shelford every day in a close carriage, with all the windows up." "Terrific! And what do you do when you get there?" "We come back again." "And have you no visitors? Does no one ever come to call?" "Yes; you came the other day." "And am I a solitary instance of would-be sociability?" "Not quite. Mr. Blessington gets into a panic about himself, sometimes, and thinks that he is drawing near his latter end; and he bids us all good-bye; and _he_ cries, and _we_ cry, and then Mr. Brand, the doctor, comes and reassures us." "I had no idea that there was anything the matter with the old gentleman."