After our little colloquy, Mrs. Bonnington, not finding much pleasure in my sulky society, had gone to Miss Prior’s room with her young folks, and as the door of the morning-room opened now and again, I could hear the dear young ones scuttling about the passages, where they were playing at horses, and fighting, and so forth. After a while good Mrs. B. came down from the schoolroom. “Whatever has happened, Mr. Batchelor?” she said to me, in her passage through the morning-room. “Miss Prior is very pale and absent. _You_ are very pale and absent. Have you been courting her, you naughty man, and trying to supplant Mr. Drencher? There now, you turn as red as my ribbon! Ah! Bessy is a good girl, and _so_ fond of my dear children. ‘Ah, dear Mrs. Bonnington,’ she says to me—but of course you won’t tell Lady B.: it would make Lady B. perfectly furious. ‘Ah!’ says Miss P. to me, ‘I wish, ma’am, that my little charges were like their dear little nephews and nieces—so exquisitely brought up!’ Pop again wished to beat his uncle. I wish—I wish Frederick would send that child to school! Miss P. owns that he is too much for her. Come, children, it is time to go to dinner.” And, with more of this prattle, the good lady summons her young ones, who descend from the schoolroom with their nephew and niece. Following nephew and niece comes demure Miss Prior, to whom I fling a knowing glance, which says, plain as eyes can speak—Do, Elizabeth, come and talk for a little to your faithful Batchelor! She gives a sidelong look of intelligence, leaves a parasol and a pair of gloves on a table, accompanies Mrs. Bonnington and the young ones into the garden, sees the clergyman’s wife and children disappear through the garden gate, and her own youthful charges engaged in the strawberry-beds; and, of course, returns to the morning-room for her parasol and gloves, which she had forgotten. There is a calmness about that woman—an easy, dauntless dexterity, which frightens me—_ma parole d’honneur_. In that white breast is there a white marble stone in place of the ordinary cordial apparatus? Under the white velvet glove of that cool hand are there bones of cold steel? “So, Drencher has again been here, Elizabeth?” I say. She shrugs her shoulders. “To see that wretched Captain Baker. The horrid little man will die! He was not actually sober just now when he—when I—when you saw him. How I wish you had come sooner—to prevent that horrible, tipsy, disreputable quarrel. It makes me very, very thoughtful, Mr. Batchelor. He will speak to his mother—to Mr. Lovel. I shall have to go away. I know I must.” “And don’t you know where you can find a home, Elizabeth? Have the words I spoke this morning been so soon forgotten?” “Oh! Mr. Batchelor! you spoke in a heat. You could not think seriously of a poor girl like me, so friendless and poor, with so many family ties. Pop is looking this way, please. To a man bred like you, what can I be?”