"Hardly, sir. I hear every three months from Lady Verney. I heard on Tuesday last. Thank God, she's well. No, it's nothing concerning her, and I think it may be something bad. I am afraid of this letter, sir--_tell_ me I need not be afraid of it." "I know the feeling, Mrs. Mervyn; I've had it myself, when duns were troublesome. But you have nothing of the kind in this happy retreat; which I really do envy you from my heart." "Envy! Ah, sir--happy retreat! Little you know, sir. I have been for weeks and months at a time half wild with anguish, dreaming of the sea. How can he know?" "Very true, I can't know; I only speak of it as it strikes me at the moment. I fancy I should so like to live here, like a hermit, quite out of the persecutions of luck and the nonsense of the world." "You are wonderfully like at times, sir--it is beautiful, it is frightful--when I moved the candle then----" "I'll sit any way you like best, Mrs. Mervyn, with pleasure, and you can move the candle, and try; if it amuses--no, I mean interests you." If some of his town friends could have peeped in through a keyhole, and seen Tom Sedley and old Rebecca Mervyn seated at opposite sides of the table, in this very queer old room, so like Darby and Joan, it would have made matter for a comical story. "Like a flash it comes!" Tom Sedley looked at the wild, large eyes that were watching him--the round spectacles now removed--across the table, and could not help smiling. "Yes, the _smile_--it _is_ the smile! You told me, sir, your name was Sedley, not Verney." "My name is Thomas Sedley. My father was Captain Sedley, and served through a part of the Peninsular campaign. He was not twenty at the battle of Vittoria, and he was at Waterloo. My mother died a few months after I was born." "Was _she_ a Verney?" "No; she was distantly connected, but her name was Melville," said he. "Connected. That accounts for it, perhaps." "Very likely." "And your father--dead?" she said, sadly. "Yes; twenty years ago." "I know, sir; I remember. They are all locked up _there_, sir, and shan't come out till old Lady Verney dies. But he was not related to the Verneys?" "No, they were friends. He managed two of the estates after he left the army, and very well, I'm told." "Sedley--Thomas Sedley--I remember the name. I did not know the name of Sedley--except on one occasion--I was sent for, but it came to nothing. I lived so much in the dark about things," and she sighed. "I forgot, Mrs. Mervyn, how late it is growing, and how much too long I have stayed here admiring your pretty room, and I fear interrupting you," said Tom, suddenly remembering his dinner, and standing up--"If you kindly give me the receipt, I'll leave it on my way back."