As the ladies retire to bed, Miss Blessington enters Esther's room--a familiarity which somewhat surprises that virgin, as it is the first time that it has been accorded to her. "I have come to congratulate you!" Constance says, civilly; "you have made a wonderful recovery." "Yes, wonderful!" "You can walk perfectly well without assistance, cannot you?" "Perfectly" (turning away her head, in the guilty consciousness of having, despite her soundness of limb, not walked without assistance). "St. John is very useful as a walking-stick, isn't he?" (playfully.) "He thought it would tire me less," replies the other, flushing; "he has been most kind!" "He always is," answers Miss Blessington, quickly: "it is his nature; old beggarwomen, dogs, cats, dirty children in the gutter--it is all one to him." "Really!" "That universal geniality amounts almost to a weakness, though an amiable one; it has often been the cause of exciting hopes that, of course, he had neither the wish nor the power to gratify." "What! in old beggarwomen, dogs, cats, and dirty children in the gutter?" says Esther, smiling merrily, yet with scorn. "If I did not take an interest in you," continued Constance, leaning in a graceful artistic pose against the mantelpiece, "I should, of course, not take the trouble to mention the subject; but, as I do, I thought it the kindest thing I could do to you to set you on your guard against attentions to which you, who do not know him, might, without vanity, attribute some importance, but which I, who know him so thoroughly, know to mean absolutely nothing, beyond a sort of general _bonhomie_ towards the whole of the human race." "I am deeply grateful," answers the young girl, with sarcastic emphasis; "but in my part of the world, girls are not in the habit of cherishing vague hopes because a man has the civility to offer them his arm when they are disabled by an accident from walking by themselves." "Well, forewarned is forearmed, you know" (nodding and smiling); "and from some careless, slighting remarks that St. John let fall the other day, I thought I should not be acting the part of a friend by you if I did not warn you against a snare into which I have seen others older, and knowing more of the world than you do, fall. Good night!" "Stay!" cries Esther, springing up, and catching hold of her companion's gauzy dress in detention. "It is unfair to tell a person half, and not the whole. What were the slighting remarks that Mr. Gerard made _à propos_ of me?" "Really, I--I--don't remember exactly," replies Constance, with reluctance, half-feigned, half-real; "I did not pay much attention at the time; it was an admission that slipped out without my intending it." "But now that it has slipped out," cries the other, authoritatively, "you must explain it fully, please." "Well, really--please don't look so tragic, it can be of so very little consequence to you what he said or did not say about you----"