"You are eight years younger than I am." "Am I?" carelessly, as if such comparative statistics were profoundly uninteresting to her. "Yes; I am glad there is so much difference in age between us." "Why?" "Because you are the more likely to outlive me." She passes by the little sentimentalism with silent contempt. "I shall _certainly_ outlive you," she says confidently. "Women mostly outlive men, even when they are of the same age. We lead slower, safer lives. If I spend all my life here, I shall probably creep on, like a tortoise, to a hundred." "But you will not spend all your life here?" he cries, eagerly. She shrugs her shoulders. "_Cela dépend_. I shall live here as long as Jack remains unmarried." "That will not be very long, I prophesy," cries Brandon, cheerfully. "A farmer requires a wife more than most men." "More than a soldier, certainly," retorts she, with a malicious smile. He laughs; too warm and lazy and content to be offended, and makes ineffectual passes at a gnat that has settled upon his nose. "Has he never yet shown even a _preference_ for any one?" he asks, feeling a more personal interest than he had ever before experienced in Jack's amours and amourettes. "Not that I am aware of; Jack and I never show preferences for any one, nor does any one ever show a preference for us; we are a good deal too poor to be in any demand." "I am glad of it." "You may have the doubtful satisfaction of knowing that no one ever showed the slightest inclination to be your rival." "So much the better; I don't want you any the less because nobody else wants you." "Don't you? 'A poor thing, but mine own,' that is your motto, I suppose?" A pause. An old woman, with a myriad-wrinkled Welsh face rides by along the road on a drooping-headed donkey; a large blue and orange handkerchief tied over her bonnet and a basket on each arm. Esther watches her as she jogs along with a feeling of envy. Fortunate, fortunate old woman! she has no lover! "I wish you would not look so happy," Miss Craven says suddenly, flashing round an uneasy look out of her great black eyes at her companion. "Why should not I? I _am_ happy." "But you have no right to be, no reason for being so," she cries, emphatically. "I have, at all events, as much reason as the birds have and they seem pretty jolly; I am alive, and the sun is shining." "You were alive, and the sun was shining, this time yesterday," she says drily; "but you were not so happy then as you are now." At the decided damper to his hilarity so evidently intended in this speech, a slight cloud passes over the young man's face; he looks down with a snubbed expression. "I suppose I am over-sanguine about everything," he says, humbly, "because I have always been such a lucky fellow; my profession suits me down to the ground; I have never had an ache or a pain in all my life, and I have the best woman in England for my mother."