"_How_ fond you are of that fellow!" says Robert, sighing again, and thinking, ruefully, what a long time it would be before any one would say to her, "_How_ fond you are of Bob Brandon!" "He is the one thing upon earth that I could not do without!" she answers shortly, turning away her head. There are some people that we love so intensely that we can hardly speak even of our own love for them without tears. "I should be afraid to say that of any one," says Bob, bluntly, "for fear of being shown that I _must_ do without them." "What have I in all the world but him?" she cries, a passionate earnestness chasing the slow languor from her voice, all her soft face afire with eager tenderness; "neither kith nor kin; neither friends nor money. I am as destitute, in fact, though not in seeming, as that girl that passed just now, shuffling her bare feet along in the dust, and with three boxes of matches--her whole stock-in-trade--in her dirty hand. But for Jack," she continues, in a lighter strain, "you might at the present moment be carrying half a pound of tea or four penn'orth of snuff as a present to me in the Naullan almshouses." Robert looks attentive, and says "Hem," which is a sort of "Selah" or "Higgaion," and does not express much beyond inarticulate interest. "I often think that he is too good for this world," says the young girl, mournfully, picking an orchis leaf, and looking down absently on the capricious black splashes that freak its green surface. Bob is a little embarrassed between his love of truth and his desire to coincide in opinion with his beloved. Jack is not in the least like the little morbid boys and girls in his sister Bessy's books, who retire into corners in play-hours to read about hell-fire, to whom marbles and toffee and bull's-eyes are as dung, and who are inextricably entangled in his mind with the idea of "too good for this world." He evades the discussion of the alarming nature of young Craven's goodness by a judicious silence. "I am such an expense to him," continues Esther, lugubriously, the corners of her mouth drooping like a child's about to cry--"what with clothes, and food, and altogether. Even though one does not eat very much every day, it comes to a great deal at the end of the year, does it not?" "If you come to me, you would be no expense at all to him," Robert answers, stroking his great, broad, yellow beard (beard that will have to disappear before he rejoins his gallant corps in Bermuda), and looking very sentimental; yet not that either, for sentimental implies the existence of a little feeling, and the affectation of a great deal more. "He would have to provide me with a trousseau and a wedding-cake, even in that case." "I would excuse him both." "Would you?" she says, jestingly; "I wouldn't; it has always seemed to me that the best part of holy matrimony is the avalanche of new clothes that attends being wed." "You shall have any amount of new clothes."