but she won’t listen to me. Miss Augustine, she don’t take on about the house; but she’s got plenty to bother her, poor soul; and the way she do carry on about them almshouses! It’s like born natural, that’s what it is, and nothing else. Oh me! I know as I didn’t ought to say it; but what can you do, I ask you, Master Everard, when you have got the like of that under your very nose? She’ll soon have nothing but paupers in the parish if she has her way.” “She’s very feeling-hearted,” said Jane, who stood behind her elder companion and put in a word now and then over Martha’s shoulder. She had been enjoying the delights of patronage, the happiness of recommending her friends in the village to Miss Augustine’s consideration; and this was too pleasant a privilege to be consistent with criticism. The profusion of her mistress’s alms made Jane feel herself to be “feeling-hearted” too. “And great thanks she gets for it all,” said Martha. “They call her the crazy one down in the village. Miss Susan, she’s the hard one; and Miss Augustine’s the crazy one. That’s gratitude! trailing about in her gray gown for all the world like a Papist nun. But, poor soul, I didn’t ought to grudge her gray, Master Everard. We’ll soon be black and black enough in our mourning, from all that I hear.” Again Everard was conscious of a shiver. He made a hasty answer and withdrew from the women who had come up to him in one of the airy corridors upstairs, half glass, like the passages below, and full of corners. Everard was on his way from a pilgrimage to the room, in which, when Herbert and he were children, they had been allowed to accumulate their playthings and possessions. It had a bit of corridor, like a glazed gallery, leading to it--and a door opened from it to the musicians’ gallery of the hall. The impulse which led him to this place was not like his usual care to avoid unpleasant sensations, for the very sight of the long bare room, with its windows half choked with ivy, the traces of old delights on the walls--bows hung on one side, whips on the other--a heap of cricket-bats and pads in a corner; and old books, pictures, and rubbish heaped upon the old creaky piano on which Reine used to play to them, had gone to his heart. How often the old walls had rung with their voices, the old floor creaked under them! He had given one look into the haunted solitude, and then had fled, feeling himself unable to bear it. “As if I could do them any good thinking!” Everard had said to himself, with a rush of tears to his eyes--and it was in the gallery leading to this room--the west gallery as everybody called it--that the women stopped him. The rooms at Whiteladies had almost every one a gallery, or an ante-room, or a little separate staircase to itself. The dinner-bell pealed out as he emerged from thence and hurried to the room which had been always called his, to prepare for dinner. How full of memories the old place was! The dinner-bell was very solemn,