When two people of very different ages meet tête à tête in a room, where they are not thoroughly domesticated,--where there are no books, no musical instruments, nor even that grand bond of sociality, a fire,--it requires no common invention and vivacity to pass an evening with tolerable cheerfulness. The little appearances of discomfort, however, which imperceptibly lower the spirits of others, had generally an opposite effect upon those of Laura. Attentive to the comfort of every human being who approached her, she was always the first to discover the existence and cause of the 'petty miseries of life;'--but, accustomed to consider them merely as calls to exertion, they made not the slightest impression on her spirits or temper. The moment she cast her eyes on her father, leaning on a table, where stood a pair of candles, that but half-lighted the room; and on the chimney, where faded fennel occupied the place of a fire, she perceived that all her efforts would be necessary to produce any thing like comfort. She began her operations, by enticing her father out of the large vacant room, into the small one, where she intended to work. Here she prepared his coffee, gave him account of the party below stairs, read to him her letter to Mrs Douglas, and did and said every thing she could imagine to amuse him. When the efforts to entertain are entirely on one side, it is scarcely in human nature to continue them; and Laura was beginning to feel very blank, when it luckily occurred to her, that she had brought her little chess-board from Glenalbert. Away she flew, and in triumph produced this infallible resort. The match was pretty equal. Captain Montreville had more skill, Laura more resource; and she defended herself long and keenly. At last she was within a move of being checkmated. But the move was hers; and the Captain, in the heat of victory, overlooked a step by which the fortune of the game would have been reversed. Laura saw it, and eagerly extended her hand to the piece; but recollecting that there is something in the pride of man's nature that abhors to be beaten at chess by a lady, she suddenly desisted; and, sweeping her lily arm across the board, 'Nay, now,' she cried, with a look of ineffable good nature, 'if you were to complete my defeat after all my hair-breadth 'scapes, you could not be so unreasonable as to expect that I should keep my temper.' 'And how dare you,' said Captain Montreville, in great good humour with his supposed victory, 'deprive me at once of the pleasures of novelty and of triumph?' By the help of this auxiliary, the evening passed pleasantly away; and, before another came, Laura had provided for it the cheap luxury of some books from a circulating library. CHAPTER VIII