“My dears, you had better resume your occupations, and leave Jabez to repose; it is not well to crowd about an invalid on so sultry a day as this.” So Miss Chadwick went, with her tatting-shuttle, back to her seat by the one window where the friendly shade of the dove-coloured curtains screened from observation any glances which might chance to stray from the tatting to the sofa; and Miss Ashton went back to her music-stool, where the sunbeams, falling through the other window, lit up her lovely profile, shot a glint of gold through her hair, and showed the dimples in her white shoulder to the half-shut, dreaming eyes of Jabez, who listened, entranced, as she practised scales and battle-pieces, waltzes and quadrilles, totally unconscious that she was feeding a fever in the soul of the apprentice more to be feared than the stroke of Aspinall’s sabre, though it had cut into the bone. Not that she was a simple school-girl, and ignorant of the power of beauty. She was pretty well as romantic as any girl of that romantic age who, being fifteen, looked a year older, and learned the art of fascination from the four-volume novels of the period. Mrs. Ashton herself subscribed to the fashionable circulating library of the town, but she was somewhat choice in her reading, and had Miss Augusta stopped where her mother did she would have done well. But it so happened that, after feasting on the wholesome peas her mother provided, she fell with avidity on husks obtained surreptitiously elsewhere. Kisses from Augusta could always coax coins from papa, and as a Miss Bohanna kept open a well-known, well-stocked circulating library in Shudehill, albeit in a cellar, its contiguity to Bradshaw Street and Mrs. Broadbent’s enabled Miss Ashton (or Cicely for her) to smuggle in amongst her school-books other fictions, such as Elizabeth Helme and Anna Maria Roche used to concoct, and Samuel Richardson provided, to delight our grandmothers with. So Miss Ashton was quite prepared to be admired and play the heroine prematurely; but she had been reared in the same house with Jabez, had been caressed and waited upon by him as a child, and anything so absurd as her father’s apprentice falling in love with her had never dawned upon her apprehension. Then not even his wounded arm could make him handsome enough for a hero, so she plunged through the “Battle of Prague,” and “Lodoiska,” and glided into the “Copenhagen Waltz,” with no suspicion of a listener more than ordinary. Mrs. Ashton, who was back-stitching a shirt-wristband (family linen was then made at home), imagined that Jabez was dozing, and, unwilling to disturb him, only spoke when a false note, or a passage out of time, called for a low-voiced hint to her daughter, or when she found occasion to make some slight observation to the equally silent Ellen.