"What! eavesdropping?" asks St. John, coming down the handsome, shallow stairs in knickerbockers and heather-mixture stockings that his old mother made him. "Hush!" holding up her forefinger; "they are at prayers." St. John listens too, and a sneer comes and settles on his mouth. "Isn't he a worthy rival for the man who said he would give any one as far as Pontius Pilate in the Creed, and then beat him?" "You ought not to abuse your own father" (in a whisper). "I know I ought not" (in another whisper). "Why do you, then?" casting down her eyes, that he may see how large a portion of downy cheeks her long curly lashes shade. "I only do for him what I know he would do for me if he had the chance." "Hush! they are nearly over." "... be with us all evermore. Amen. Morris!" "Yes, Sir Thomas." "What the deuce do you mean sticking the legs of that chair against the wall knocking all the paint off the wainscot?" "Oh! blessings on his kindly voice, And on his silver hair!" says St. John, in ironical quotation; and then the door opens, and a long string of servants issue out, and the two culprits again, as on the previous evening, together enter. Lady Gerard never appears at breakfast. About twenty years ago she had an illness, and, on the strength of it, has kept up a character for invalidhood ever since. Miss Blessington takes her place at the head of the table; she is sitting there now. Her shapely hands are busy among the teacups; her white lids drooped over her calm eyes. There is a great gold cross on her breast, that rises and falls in soft, even undulations. Eve, as she was when first she grew into separate entity and embodiment out of Adam's side; Eve, of creamiest flesh, and richest, reddest blood, before a soul--a tormenting, puzzling, intangible, incomprehensible soul--was breathed into her. When Constance marries, her husband will gaze at her as a man might gaze at Gibson's "Venus," supposing that he had bought for a great price that marvel of modern sculpture, and had set it up in the place of honour in his gallery. He would half-shut his eyes, the better to appreciate the exquisite turn of the cold, stately throat, the modelling of the little rounded wrist; would put his head on one side, and look at it this way and that, to determine whether he liked the tinting. "Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null," as the pithy line that everybody knows, and that next to nobody could have written, hath it. At forty Constance will be a much handsomer woman than Esther. At forty those clean-cut, immovable, expressionless features will be hardly the worse for wear; that colourless marble skin will be hardly less smoothly polished than it is now. At forty Esther (if she live so long) will have cried and laughed, and fretted and teased herself into a mere shadow of her present self.