Lucy was not a young lady to sit idle. She could find something to do in every hour in the day. As Miss Acton did the housekeeping, Lucy was left to her own inventions, and being a girl of several resources, she was very happy in pleasing herself. Miss Acton went to look after the affairs of the home, and to attend to the needs of a little congregation of poor who were ushered into the housekeeper's room one after another every morning, excepting Sunday, where they stated their wants and obtained such relief as Miss Acton's closets, stocked from her own purse, could supply; and if they did not get always exactly what they wished, they were sure of tender and consoling words, of sympathetic enquiry into their troubles, of a promise of some stockings for little James next week, of a roll of flannel for old Martha the day after to-morrow. Pleasant and instructive it might have been to witness this old lady in her hoop and flowered gown asking questions, handing purges, promising little gifts of apparel to the poor people, who ceaselessly sank in curtsies, or plucked at wisps of hair upon their foreheads whilst they scraped the ground behind with their feet. Lucy first of all spent three-quarters of an hour in drawing. She was a charming picture as she sat in the library bending over her board; her eyes dwelt in their beauty of lids and heavy lashes, sometimes with a little fire of pleasure, sometimes with a little life of impatience, upon the motions of her pencil and its results, and perhaps not always did she think of what she was about, for now and again the pencil would stand idle in her hand, the natural glow of her cheek would slightly deepen as to some visitation of moving thought; her eyes would lift in languor from her work to the open window, upon the bit of landscape which it framed, beautiful with the small darts, and curves, and lights of springtime in the trees, they appeared to brood in contemplation from which she broke sometimes with a faint smile, sometimes with an expression upon her sweet lips which found a deeper loveliness for her naturally pensive look. When she had done with her drawing, she went to the piano and passed another half-hour at that instrument, then took up some work which she presently neglected for a novel, and shortly after eleven o'clock she mounted to her bedroom to prepare herself for a drive with her aunt. At half-past eleven a carriage and pair drove through the gates and stopped in front of the house, and there fell from the box a groom in a livery of brass buttons and orange facings, who posted himself opposite the hall door and with crooked knee studied the entrance with trained intentness. He was not kept waiting long. The hall door was opened, and Mr Bates, the butler, appeared with a shawl and rug and the pug. A few minutes later Miss Acton and Lucy entered the carriage, one nursing her pug, the other her terrier. And when some parcels were put in they were driven away.