“A fool of you?—as if I thought of anything but his ’appiness!” Amanda Pynsent exclaimed. She stood looking at him but following her own reflexions; she had given up the attempt to enter into his whims. She remembered what she had noticed in other occurrences, that his reasons were always more extraordinary than his behaviour itself. If you only considered his life you wouldn’t have thought him so immoral. “Very likely I think too much of that,” she added. “She wants him and cries for him; that’s what keeps coming back to me.” She took up her lamp to light Mr. Vetch to the door (for the dim luminary in the passage had long since been extinguished), and before he left the house he turned suddenly, stopping short and with his composed face taking a strange expression from the quizzical glimmer of his little round eyes. “What does it matter after all, and why do you worry? What difference can it make what happens—on either side—to such low people?” III Mrs. Bowerbank had let her know she would meet her almost at the threshold of the dreadful place; and this thought had sustained Miss Pynsent in her long and devious journey, performed partly on foot, partly in a succession of omnibuses. She had had ideas about a cab, but she decided to reserve the cab for the return, as then, very likely, she should be so prostrate with emotion, so overpoweringly affected, that it would be a comfort to escape from observation. She had no confidence that if once she passed the door of the prison she should ever be restored to liberty and her customers; it seemed to her an adventure as dangerous as it was dismal, and she was immensely touched by the clear-faced eagerness of the child at her side, who strained forward as brightly as he had done on another occasion, still celebrated in Miss Pynsent’s industrious annals, a certain sultry Saturday in August when she had taken him to the Tower. It had been a terrible question with her, once she had made up her mind, what she should tell him about the nature of their errand. She determined to tell him as little as possible, to say only that she was going to see a poor woman who was in prison on account of a crime committed many years before, and who had sent for her and caused her to be told at the same time that if there was any child she could see—as children (if they were good) were bright and cheering—it would make her very happy that such a little visitor should come as well. It was very difficult, with Hyacinth, to make reservations or mysteries; he wanted to know everything about everything and he projected the fierce light of his questions on Miss Pynsent’s incarcerated friend. She had to admit that she had been her friend (since where else was the obligation to go to see her?) but she spoke of the acquaintance as if it were of the slightest (it had survived in the memory of the prisoner only because every one else—the world was so very severe!—had turned away from