Innocent

CHAPTER XV.

A SUNDAY AT HOME.

Innocent, it may well be supposed, had been thrown into the shade by these great events in Nelly’s history, and yet she was, notwithstanding, a most important element in the discomfort which began to creep into the house. The very first day after her arrival she had begun her strange career. Brought down-stairs for meals, she would sit very quietly, eating or pretending to eat what was offered to her—and much of what was offered to her was so strange to her that she fared but badly, poor child, until a new habit had begun to form, and the wholesome appetite of youth had driven away her prejudices. It is a whimsical thought, and one which we are aware the British intellect in general declines to contemplate, that frog-eating foreigners, or those still more miserable specimens of humanity who are brought up upon maccaroni and polenta, should not when they come among us take any more enthusiastically to our richer fare than we do to theirs; but yet, strange to say, this is unquestionably the case—and poor Innocent had very little to eat for the first few days, not knowing the looks of things, and hesitating, as the inexperienced always do, to venture upon the unknown. When the meal was over, unless absolute moral force was exerted to restrain her, she escaped at once to her own room, her constant occupancy of which became at once a standing grievance of the housemaid, who immediately settled in her mind that this unusual course of procedure was suggested by an ardent desire to spy upon her movements, and to report her imperfections to her mistress. There were countless complaints from this quarter about the impossibility of “cleaning out” Miss Innocent’s room, or even of “cleaning out” Miss Ellinor’s room, which adjoined, or, in short, of doing anything whatever under the constant inspection of the stranger’s eyes. What with this offence against the housemaid of being constantly in her bedroom, and the offence against the cook of never being satisfied with anything at table, and the offence against Brownlow of paying no attention to his intimations that dinner was ready, Innocent was in bad odour with all the servants except Alice, who stood by her quietly, without any warmer applause, however, than that there was no “hairm in the girl.” In the higher regions Innocent made a still more puzzling and painful impression. When she could be retained among them she sat dumb in a corner, generally near one of the windows, saying nothing, answering “Yes” and “No” to the questions addressed to her, doing nothing, presenting a blank, impenetrable surface of silence to all the attempts at friendly intercourse made by the lively and genial group which she intruded herself amongst like a figure of stone. She would obey when absolutely commanded, and for the immediate moment of the command—but then only as by machinery, without the least appearance of entering into the spirit of the directions given her, or wishing to please, or desiring to bring herself into accord with her surroundings. No idea, indeed, of putting herself in accord with her surroundings seemed ever to enter into her mind. She was an alien in her own consciousness, altogether untouched by the distress, the vexation, the bewilderment caused by her self-isolation. Perhaps if, as Mrs. Eastwood said, they had been able to love the girl heartily, and by nature, without any action of hers to call it forth, they might have thawed the snow-image. But beyond the natural bounds of the family, love ceases to be given in this instinctive, causeless way, and nobody can long resist the repellant effect of a perpetual non-response. The girl was a worry and vexation to Mrs. Eastwood and Nelly, and she was the cause of much suppressed merriment to Dick, who held that she was sulky, and giving herself airs, and ought to be laughed at. Jenny, as the reader has been informed, looked at the matter in a more philosophical way; but neither nature nor philosophy threw any light upon the darkness, or suggested any way of mending the matter. The strange girl in their midst occupied the ladies (before the moment of Nelly’s engagement) perpetually. They took her out, they tried to amuse her, they tried to sympathize with her, they asked countless questions, and elicited many details of her former life; but they never moved her with all their pettings and coaxings to say one word to them, or to stay one moment with them longer than she was compelled.

This was the outside aspect of affairs, as seen by those surrounding her, who were much discouraged in every way by the strange passiveness of the new comer; but to Innocent herself the world bore a different appearance, as may be supposed. She had been brought up in utter solitude; her father, who cared little for her, and took little notice of her, and Niccolo, who had done everything, were the two sole figures with which she was familiar. Other human forms she had seen going about the streets, gliding round her in a strange, dull phantasmagoria, without touching her. Her intellect was feeble, or so partially awakened that she had never yet begun to think of her own position either present or future, or connexion with the rest of humanity. All that life had yet been to her was a window through which she had seen other people, bearing no connexion with herself, moving about with mysterious comings, and going through a world not realized. She had watched them with a certain dull wonder. Their occupations and their activity surprised without interesting her. Why should they take so much trouble, why keep so constantly in motion? And then the whirlwind had seemed to seize herself, to whirl her through air and space, through a still stranger phantasmagoria—moving pictures of sea and land, and to set her down in the very heart of one of those strange groups of people who were so unlike anything she had ever known, people who clustered together and talked and laughed and had a great deal to do with each other, but among whom she felt as strange as a stray olive leaf dropped among the cast-off garments of English beech and elm. She could not mix with them. She felt no interest in what they did or said, and no desire to feel any interest. She was even secretly vexed, as much as her dulled nature would allow, by all the care taken of her, the demands which she was daily conscious they made, the disappointment with her irresponsiveness, which more or less they all showed. Why could not they let her alone? She had not, as Nelly sometimes supposed, any conventional prepossession in her mind, or feeling that she, the penniless niece and dependent, must be of necessity slighted and kept down, an idea which does take possession of some natures, and cause much unreasonable mischief. Such a notion, however, was much too complicated, much too profound for the mind of Innocent. It was not so much that she had a false impression about her relationship with them as that she had no real conception of any relationship at all. She accepted her external surroundings mechanically, without even asking herself what right she had to be an inmate of her aunt’s house, or to be cared for as she was. Gratitude was more than impossible to her; she did not know what the word meant. She had never asked to be brought to Mrs. Eastwood’s house; it occurred to her in her ignorance that she would rather have stayed in Pisa, but it never occurred to her to ask why she could not stay in Pisa, why Niccolo had been sent away, and she brought here. She had never possessed more than a franc or two in her life, and had no idea of the value of money or its necessity. In short, the development of her mind was rather that of six than sixteen. Nothing was formed in her except the striking personality and individuality that shut her up within herself as within a husk, and kept her from mingling with others. This absence of all capability of thought or feeling, this perfect blank and stupefaction of intellect and heart, took away from her all that lively sense of novelty, all that interest in the unknown which is so strong and so beneficent in youth. She did not ask to understand either the things or persons round her. She accepted them dully, as she would have accepted any other order of things; they did not affect her at all; they moved her neither to love nor to hatred, scarcely even to wonder; through them all she pursued her own dull way, crossed by these other threads of existence perforce, but never entangling with them, or allowing herself to be woven into the common web. Their outcries and laughter, their manifestations of feeling, their fondness for each other, the perpetual movement of life among them, affected her only with a vague surprise too faint for that lively title, and a still more languid contempt. She had nothing in common with them; they were, it seemed to her, restless, afflicted with a fever of activity, bound by some treadmill necessity to talk, and walk, and move about, and be always doing, of which her frame and mind were totally unconscious. A vague resentment against them—the girl scarcely knew why—for disturbing her with their companionship, and subjecting her to such strange demands for a sympathy which she had not to give, and an affection for which she felt no need, gave a certain reality to the mistiness of her sensations. But that was all; she came among them like a thing dropped out of another sphere, having no business, no pleasure, nothing whatever to do or to learn upon this alien earth.

But there was an exception to this rule. Innocent clung to Frederick as a savage might cling to the one white man who had brought her out of her woods and from among her people into the strange and beautiful world of civilized life. She knew him, though she knew no one else. Frederick was her revelation, her one discovery out of the darkness which surrounded every other nature. She formed no very close or distinct estimate of him, but at least she was conscious of another existence which affected her own, and upon which she was to some degree dependent. When Mrs. Eastwood found her lurking in the hall in the cold and darkness, waiting for Frederick, an immediate and full-grown love tale glimmered before the unfortunate mother’s eyes, filling her with dismay. But Innocent’s thoughts had taken no such form. She was as unconscious of love as of any other passion, and had as little idea of anything to follow as a baby. It was, however, her only point of human interest, the sole thing which drew her out of herself. When Frederick was present she had eyes only for him; when he spoke she listened, not much understanding what he said, but vaguely stimulated by the very sound of his voice. When he told her to do anything she made an effort to bring her mind to bear upon it, and somehow took in what he said. The moment when he came home was the moment to which she looked forward the whole day through. A vague sense that he understood her, that he did not ask too much from her like the others, made no bewildering demand on her comprehension, but accepted what she gave with a matter-of-fact simplicity equal to her own, gave her confidence in him. Could she have been with Frederick alone she would have been happy; or would he even have permitted her to sit close to him, or hold his hand, while the bewildering conversation of the others—conversation which they expected her to join in and understand—was going on around, Innocent would have been more able to bear it. This, however, he had privately explained to her could not be.

“When we are alone I do not mind,” he said, with a condescension which suited his natural temper, “but when we are with the others it makes you ridiculous, Innocent; and what is more, it makes me ridiculous. They laugh at both you and me.”

“Why should they laugh?” asked the girl.

“Because it is absurd,” he said, frowning. “I cannot allow you to make me a laughing-stock. Of course, as I tell you, I don’t mind so much when we are alone.”

And he stroked her hair with a caressing kindness which was at that time about the best sentiment in the young man’s mind. He was often embarrassed by her, and sometimes had asked himself the question, What on earth was it to come to? for he too, like his mother, believed that Innocent was in love with him; and the love of such a girl, so manifested, was more absurd than gratifying. But yet he was always kind to her. Evil impulses enough of one kind and another were in his mind, and he could have made of this girl anything he pleased, his slave, the servant of his will in any way. But he never treated her otherwise than as his little sister, and was kind, and put up with her demonstrative affection, and did his best to advise her “for her good.”

“You must not shrink so from my mother and Nelly,” he said. “They want to be kind to you. If you could only take to them, it would be much better for you than taking to a fellow like me——”

“I don’t like women,” said Innocent. “My father always said so. I cannot help being one myself, but I hate them. And nobody is like you.”

“That is very pleasant for me,” said Frederick, “but you must not keep up that notion about women. Your father was a capital judge, I have no doubt, but he might have taught you something more useful. Depend upon it, you will never be happy till you make friends with your own sex. They may be dangerous to men, though men are not generally of your opinion,” continued the moralist, “but for you, Innocent, mark my words, it is far your best policy to make the women your friends.”

“What is policy?” she asked, stealing her hand into his, much as a dog puts his nose into his master’s hand.

“Pshaw!” said Frederick. His mother had come into the room and had seen this pantomime. “You ought to be put to school and learn English,” he added, somewhat roughly. “I don’t believe she understands half of what we say.”

“Indeed, I should not be sorry to think so,” said Mrs. Eastwood, not without severity in her tone. But the severity was lost upon Innocent. She understood, as she did always by some strange magic understand Frederick, that she was now to withdraw from him and do her best to appear indifferent. It was a Sunday afternoon, rainy and miserable—and a rainy Sunday afternoon, when English domestic virtue shuts up all its ordinary occupations, is, it must be allowed, a dreary moment. I do not at all agree in the ordinary conventional notion of the dreariness of English Sundays generally, but I allow that a Sunday afternoon, when all the good people are at home, when the children are forbidden to play, and the women’s work is carefully put away, as if innocent embroidery were sin, and the men do not know what to do with themselves, is trying. If you are musical to the extent of Handel you may be happy, but the only thing to be done otherwise in a good orthodox respectable family, bound by all the excellent English traditions, is to pick a quarrel with some one. About five o’clock or so, with the rain pouring steadily down into the garden, the flower-beds becoming puddles before your eyes, the trees looking in upon you like pitiful ghosts—if you have not dared the elements and gone to afternoon church, you must quarrel or you must die.

Mrs. Eastwood felt the necessity. She called Frederick close to her, and she addressed him in an undertone. Innocent had gone away, and placed herself in a chair close by the window. She had not even “taken a book”—the impossibility of making her ever “take a book” was one of the miseries of the house. She was gazing blankly out upon the rain, upon the trees that shivered and seemed to ask for shelter, and the beds, where a draggled line of closed-up crocuses were leaning their bosoms upon the mud. Her beautiful profile was outlined distinctly against the pale gray dreary light. It was a beautiful profile always, more beautiful than the full face, which wanted life. Blank as the day itself was her countenance, with that motiveless gaze which was, indeed, almost mystic in its absolute want of animation. Her hands were crossed upon her lap, her whole limp girlish figure seemed to sympathize with the dreariness outside. Mrs. Eastwood looked with a mixture of pity, sympathy, and disapproval at this apathetic, immovable being, so self-absorbed, and yet so childish and pitiful in her self-absorption. She drew Frederick to her and laid her hand upon his arm.

“Frederick, look there,” she said in a low tone, “if you were not in the room Innocent would rush off up-stairs. She stays only for you. I saw you just now with her as I came in. For God’s sake, take care what you are about. You are turning that child’s head.”

“Bah! nonsense,” said Frederick, freeing himself with a complacent smile.

“It is not nonsense. I have watched her since ever she came. She has neither eyes nor ears but for you.”

“Is that my fault?” said Frederick, making a motion as if to break away.

“I do not say it is your fault. Stop and hear what I have to say. It was very good of you, no doubt, to be so kind to her on the journey, to gain her confidence——”

“Your words are very nice, mother,” said Frederick, “but your tone implies that it was anything but good of me, as if I had gained her confidence with an evil intention——”

“Frederick! how dare you put such a suggestion into my lips? If I were to answer you as you deserve, I should say that only a guilty mind could have thought of such a thing, or thought that I could think of it,” cried Mrs. Eastwood, becoming involved in expression as she lost her temper. This heat on both sides was entirely to be attributed to the Sunday afternoon. On arriving so near the brink of the quarrel as this, Mrs. Eastwood paused.

“Sunday is not a day for quarrelling,” she said, “and heaven knows I have no wish to quarrel with any one, much less my own boy; but Frederick, dear, you must let me warn you. You do not know the world as I do (heaven help the innocent soul!) nor how people are led on further than they have any intention; nor how the simplest kindness on your part may affect the imagination of a girl. She is not much more than a child——”

“She is an utter child—and a fool besides,” said Frederick, throwing the female creature about whom he was being lectured overboard at once, as a sacrifice to the waves, according to the wont of man.

“I would not say that,” said Mrs. Eastwood doubtfully. “She is a very strange girl, but I do not like to think she is a fool; and as for being a child—a child of sixteen is very near a woman—and, my dear, without meaning it, without thinking of it, you might do a great deal of harm. With a brooding sort of girl like this, you can never tell what may be going on. If she was one to speak out and say what she is thinking, like my Nelly——”

“Nelly! Well, to do her justice, she is very different from Nelly,” said Frederick, with that natural depreciation of his sister which is also usual enough, and which was largely increased by Sunday-afternoonishness.

“No, indeed, she is not like Nelly, more’s the pity,” said Mrs. Eastwood, fortunately not detecting the injurious tone. “She is so shut up in herself that you can never tell what may be going on within her. I am sure you don’t mean it, Frederick, but sometimes I think, for Innocent’s own sake, it would be better if you were not quite so kind. I don’t like her waiting for you in the hall, and that sort of thing. There is no harm in it, I know—but I don’t like it. It is always an unpleasant thing to have ideas—which she would be better without—put into a girl’s head.”

“You are too mysterious for me to follow,” said Frederick. “What ideas? If you will be a little more plain in your definition——”

She was his mother, and thought she knew a great deal more than he did about life; but she blushed as red as a girl at this half-contemptuous question.

“Frederick, you know very well what I mean,” she said quickly, “and I hope you will not try to make me sorry that I have appealed to you at all. You may make Innocent more fond of you than will be good for her, poor child, and that can produce nothing but unhappiness. I am not finding fault, I am only warning you. Her I cannot warn, because she so shuts herself up. She is a mystery,” said poor Mrs. Eastwood, shaking her head.

“Whip her,” said Frederick, with a little scornful laugh; and he walked off to the library, where Dick was pretending to read, and really teaching Winks, who had been having a mauvais quart d’heure, and whose patience was so utterly exhausted that nothing but his regard for the family could have kept him from snapping. Winks made his escape when the door was opened, and rushed to the drawing-room, where nobody was allowed to insult his intellect by tricks. He came and sat up before his mistress on his hind legs, waving his feathery forepaws in expostulation. She understood him, which is consolatory alike to dogs and men. The tears had come into her eyes at the unkind scorn of Frederick’s tone, but this other complaint brought a little laughter and carried off the sharpness. “Yes, Winks, they are wicked boys,” she said, half laughing, half crying. Dick declared after that Winks had been “sneaking,” and I think the dog himself was a little ashamed of having told; but it did the mother good, and set her thinking of her Dick, who was not too bright, nor yet very industrious, but the honestest fellow!—and that thought made her laugh, and healed the little prick in her heart.

CHAPTER XVI.

INNOCENT’S FIRST ADVENTURE.

Innocent had remained quite unconscious that she was the subject of this conversation. She was still a little in doubt even of the words of a dialogue carried on by others. The quickness of utterance which strikes every one when hearing an unaccustomed language, the half completed phrases, the words half said, confused her mind, which was not equal to such a strain, and her want of interest in the matter limited her comprehension tenfold more. She sat with her profile marked out against the light, the line of the curtains falling just beyond her, the garden furnishing a vague background, until some time after Frederick had left the room. She had scarcely moved while she sat there; there was nothing to look at, nothing to occupy her, but that did not matter to Innocent. When Frederick was gone she, too, moved a little, and after a few minutes stole out and up-stairs like a ghost. She went to her room, stealing through Nelly’s, where her cousin was occupied about some of the little legitimate Sunday employments which a good English girl may permit herself on a rainy Sunday. Nelly made some little friendly observation, but Innocent glided past and closed the door upon her. Innocent, however, had nothing to do; she sat down by the fireplace, where, Mrs. Eastwood being extravagant in this particular, there burned a cheery little fire. But the fire was no comfort to her. So far as she had any feeling at all, she disliked the warm little room, with all its cushions and curtains, and its position so close to her cousin’s. Now and then she thought of the cold and bare rooms at the Palazzo Scaramucci, so large and empty, and lonely, with something like a sigh. Her life there, which was so void of any interest, so blank and companionless, came back upon her as if it had been something better, more natural than this. There no one bade her talk, bade her do anything; no one cared what she was about. She might stand for hours at the window, looking out, and no one would chide her or ask why she did so. Books and music, and such perplexing additions to life, had no existence there: and in Pisa there was room enough to move about, and air enough to breathe. With the help of a scaldino, and the old velvet cloak, which she kept in her box now, she had been able to keep the cold at bay; but here she grew drowsy over the fire, and had no need for her cloak. There too she might do what she pleased, and no one ever said Why?—no one except Niccolo, who did not matter. Whereas now she could not go in or out of her room without being observed, without having somebody to peep at her and to say, “Ah, it is you.” What did it matter who it was? If people would but let her alone! I do not know how long she had been alone, shut up in the little room, when Nelly knocked at the door. During the short time since Innocent’s arrival Nelly had gone through a great many different states of mind respecting her. She had been eager, she had been sympathetic, she had been sorry, she had been angry, and then she had recommenced and been sympathetic, sorry, and indignant again. The only thing Nelly could not do, though she advised her mother with great fervour to do it, was to let the stranger alone.

“Leave her to herself, mamma,” Nelly said with precocious wisdom, “let us have patience, and by and by she will see that we mean her nothing but good, and she will come to herself.”

This was admirable advice if Nelly herself could only have taken it. But she could not; a dangerous softness would come over her at the very height of her resolution. She would say to herself, “Poor Innocent, how lonely she must be!” and would go again and commit herself, and endeavour in another and yet another way to melt the unmeltable. On this Sunday she had begun the day very strongly in the mind that it was best to leave Innocent alone; but the sight of the pale girl gliding past, escaping to her solitude, shutting herself up alone, was too much for Nelly. The soft-hearted creature resisted her impulse as long as possible, and then she gave in. Surely this time there must be an opening somehow to the shut-up heart. She knocked softly at the closed door, which, indeed, Innocent had almost closed upon her. “May I come in?” she said softly. It was not easy to make out the answer which came reluctantly from within; but Nelly interpreted it to mean consent. She went in and sat down by the fire, and began to talk. It was before her engagement, and she had not that one unfailing subject to excite Innocent’s interest upon, if that were possible; but she chattered as only a well-conditioned good-hearted girl can do, trying to draw the other from her own thoughts. Then she proposed suddenly an examination of the house. “You have never been over the house, Innocent; come, there is no harm in doing that on Sunday. There is a whole floor of attics over this, and the funniest hiding-holes; and there are some curiosities which, if we only could find room for them, are well worth seeing. Are you fond of china, or pictures? Tell me what you like most.”

“No,” said Innocent, “nothing.”

“Oh, that is just because you don’t know. China is my delight. If I had my way I would cram the drawing-room; but mamma is no true connoisseur; she likes only what is pretty. Come along and I will show you the house.”

Innocent rose, more to avoid controversy than from any interest in the house. Nelly showed her a great many interesting things in the attics; an old screen, which you or I, dear reader, would have given our ears for; a whole set of old oak furniture, which had once been in the library; old prints, turned with their faces to the wall; and one or two family portraits. The girl moved quite unaffected through all these delights. She neither knew their value nor saw their beauty. She answered Nelly’s questions with yes or no, and vaguely longed to get away again. To do what?—nothing. Once, and only once, she was moved a little. It was when Nelly introduced her into the old schoolroom, a bare room, with a sloping roof and two windows, looking away over the elms to the suburban road some distance off, which led into London, and showed moving specks of figures, carriages, and people, diminished by the distance, over the bare tops of the trees. There were neither curtains nor carpets in this bare place. It was cold and deserted, apart from the other rooms, up a little staircase by itself. Innocent gave a cry of something like pleasure when she went in. “I like this room,” she said, and it was about the first unsuggested observation she had made since her arrival. “May I come and live here?”

“Here! far away from us all?” cried Nelly, “with no furniture, no pictures, nothing to make you cheerful! It would seem like banishment to put you here. You do not mean to say you like this bare little place?”

“Yes,” said the girl, “I can breathe here. I can see out of the windows; and I should not trouble anybody. I like this best.”

“Innocent, you must not talk of troubling anybody. All that troubles us is when we think you are not happy.”

“I should be happy here,” she said wistfully, sitting down on the ledge of the window, which was low, and turning her gaze to the distant road.

“Oh, Innocent!” said Nelly, half inclined to cry in her disappointment; “if you knew how much I wished to make your room pretty, how I worked at it, and how anxious mamma and I were to make it look like home to you! We thought you would feel less lonely if you were close to us, and felt that we were within call night and day. We hoped you would grow fond of us, Innocent! You don’t really mean that you would like to get away from mamma and me?”

To this appeal Innocent made no immediate answer. She looked far away over the tree tops, and watched the omnibuses, crawling like flies along the road. It was not a beautiful or exciting sight, but it soothed her somehow, like “the woven paces and the waving hands” of Merlin’s spell—the subtle influence of motion apart from herself, which acted upon her like a cadence and rhythm. Then she said slowly, as if to herself, “I like this best.”

“Oh, you cold-hearted, unkind thing!” cried impetuous Nelly, growing red and angry. “After all we have done and tried to do to make you comfortable! Don’t you care for anything or any one? Good heavens! how can any girl be so indifferent! You deserve to have nobody care for you; you deserve to be kept by yourself, to be allowed to do whatever you please, never to be minded or thought of. You deserve—to be shaken!” said Nelly, with all the heat of sudden passion.

Innocent turned round and looked at her, vaguely wondering; though she did not comprehend the gentler emotions, she knew what it was to be scolded. It was an experience she had gone through before. Her father and Niccolo had both scolded her, and the sound was familiar. Perhaps it might even have penetrated her apathy, and roused some sort of life in her, had not poor Nelly been smitten by instant compunction, and gone down metaphorically on her knees to expiate her fault.

“Oh, what a wretch I am,” cried Nelly, “to lose patience with you like this, you poor, dear, little lonely child. I dare say you will care for us in time. I did not mean to be disagreeable, Innocent. It was only disappointment and vexation, and my horrid temper. Forgive me, won’t you?” she said, taking the girl’s hand. Innocent let it drop as soon as she could extricate her fingers. She was moved only to wonder, and a feeling scarcely lively enough to be called impatience—weariness of this perpetual emotion. Nelly seemed to her to be always laughing or crying, always demanding sympathy, requiring to be responded to, asking answers which by no strain of her nature could Innocent give.

“Oh, don’t!” she said, as her cousin put her arms round her and pleaded for pardon. Poor Nelly, transported with anger and repulsed kindness, had nearly blazed up again, but fortunately restrained herself, looking with a kind of dismay at the other’s composure, which, indeed, was a little disturbed by confused amazement, but nothing more.

“You are a very strange girl,” she said, drawing away with a feeling of offence which had never before surmounted her friendliness and pity; “but if you will keep us all at arm’s length, I suppose you must be allowed to do it. If you wish for it very much mamma, I am sure, will let you have this room.”

“I could sleep there,” said Innocent, pointing to a hard little settee, which Nelly knew was far from luxurious.

“Oh, you need not be afraid. I shall take care that you are comfortable,” said indignant Nelly, and she went away down-stairs with dignity to lay the case before her mother. “You know the way back to your own room?” she said, pausing at the door. “As it is Sunday we cannot make the change to-day.” Innocent heard, and gazed at her, but made no answer. She did not know how she had offended her cousin; neither, it is true, did she care; but yet a certain surprise awoke in her mind. Why was Nelly angry? What was there to make any one angry? Innocent did not connect the “scolding” which she was aware of with anything that might have called it forth. Scolding was in her experience a phenomenon by itself, not attached by way of cause and effect to any other phenomena. Many times in her life she had been scolded; but very seldom could she have told why. In this present case the cause was one entirely beyond her moral grasp. If she had broken a china tea cup or torn a dress, these would have been tangible causes of displeasure, which her mind could have taken in; but this was altogether mysterious. Perhaps it was partially owing to the strange way in which she had been brought up, and the absence of natural love in her early life, that Innocent’s entire mental constitution was of so peculiar a kind. She had no consciousness of the home affections, no need of them, no perception of their sweetness. Whether there might not be in her the capacity for a great love was yet unproved; but she had no affections. Such a condition of nature is not so rare perhaps as we think. There are both men and women who can love with passion the lover or the mistress, the husband or the wife, but who remain through all the warmth of that one possibility cold as death to all other affections. The decorous guise of ordinary life prevents such natures from making themselves fully visible in many cases. But Innocent was like a savage; she was unaware of the necessity of those gentle pretences and veils of apparent feeling which hold civilized life together. Therefore she sinned openly, and, so to speak, innocently, against the softer natural sentiments which are general to humanity, yet did not exist in her own bosom. She knew nothing about them, and she had never been taught to feign a virtue which she did not possess.

She sat in her newly-found refuge till she was thoroughly chilled with cold, and gazing from the window she found out an object which exercised some influence upon her afterwards, and got her into some immediate trouble. This was a little chapel in the distant road, which some freak of her imagination connected with that little church of the Spina which she had been in the habit of frequenting in Pisa in so strange and passive a way. I need not tell the gentle reader that the Methodist chapel in the Brighton-road was profoundly unlike any chapel ever dedicated to Our Lady. This particular Little Bethel, however, was ornamented in front with some stucco pinnacles and tabernacle work, which caught at a stray corner of Innocent’s memory. She had been taken to church that very morning, to a church utterly unlike Santa Maria della Spina—a huge place, with pews and galleries full of people, where she had looked on at a service of which she had very little knowledge, and listened to a sermon which she never attempted to understand. A longing for her old haunt came upon her as she saw the place which seemed to recall it to her mind. If she could but get there it seemed to her that part of her old life—with which she had never been dissatisfied—would come back.

Innocent had so far felt the thrill of awakening novelty and change as to know that her present life was not satisfactory, though rather in the instinctive way of sensation than by any conscious thought. The little chapel possessed her not with any idea of improvement or knowledge to be gained, but only as a possible means of drawing back to her a scrap of the past. Innocent had a consciousness that were she to rush out immediately to find this place she would be stopped and “scolded,” or perhaps locked in, and prevented for ever from gratifying her wish, so she resisted her impulse to go at once. The dreary afternoon by this time was over, and the dressing-bell sounded its welcome summons through the house. Frederick was dining out, so that there was nothing to detain her in the drawing-room during the evening. She stole up to her room as soon as dinner was over, and, taking her old velvet cloak from her trunk, and the old black hat which she had worn in Pisa, stole very carefully down-stairs, and out into the darkness. Nobody saw her making her stealthy exit, and it was with a strange sense of bewildered freedom mixed with fear that she found herself out of doors alone, in the drizzling rain and darkness. She had no superstitious terrors, however, of any kind, her imagination being too little active to make them possible, and she had run down the long dark stairs of the Palazzo Scaramucci too often to be afraid merely of the dark. It was the novelty, the uncertainty as to how to turn and where to go that moved her. However, Innocent had the good fortune which so often attends the beginning of a foolish enterprise. By a maze of muddy turnings, which she took aright by mere luck, and without making any note of them for guidance on her return, she managed to make her way to the chapel. It was resounding with the clangour of a hymn, chanted at the top of their voices by the young men and young women who form in all places and in all churches the majority of the evening worshippers. The noise startled this poor little pilgrim; but she stole in notwithstanding, to the mean little building full of pews and glaring gas-lights, which was like and yet unlike Mr. Browning’s wonderful description. The sight of the place inside startled Innocent still more. The quaint darkness of her little Italian church, the silent people kneeling and sitting here and there, the priest proceeding with his uncomprehended mystery at the altar, the glimmer of the tapers, the odour of the incense, were strangely replaced by the glare of light, the clangour of the hymn, the people packed close in their pews, who stared at the lonely girl as she entered. The chapel was very full; but Innocent, whose instinct led her to the dark corners, found a refuge in a dim pew close to the door, underneath the little gallery, where, after a while, a grim old pew-opener with a black bonnet came and sat beside her. Innocent went through her own little simple formula; she kneeled down and said the Lord’s Prayer; and then she seated herself and gazed towards the pulpit, which stood in place of the altar. I do not know whether the sermon that followed would of itself have attracted her attention any more than the more regular and decorous one which she had heard in the morning. But while poor Innocent sat looking rather than listening, and began to think of repeating her prayer and going away again, the old woman at her side uttered a groan which chilled the very blood in her veins. The girl shrank away from her into the corner of the pew as far as she could go, and turned her eyes from the pulpit to her terrible neighbour. But no sooner had she recoiled thus than a man in front of her uttered another exclamation. The preacher was one famous in the Wesleyan connexion, whose appearance prepared his audience for excitement, and as he went on the exclamations grew louder and louder. Innocent, who had no understanding of this proceeding at all, who could not make out even the words of those cries which rose around her, was first startled into fright, and then frozen into physical terror. I don’t know what dreadful vision of savages and cannibals and human sacrifices came into her bewildered mind; a mixture of fairy tales and those horrors of ghosts and vampires which still linger about Italy, and which she had heard, though at an ordinary moment her memory would not have retained them. The old woman by her side was pale and haggard, with long teeth and large jaws. She groaned at regular intervals, so regular that Innocent got to be prepared for them, though they made her jump each time they sounded on her ear. When her endurance was almost at an end, and she had become sick with very fear, there came a lull in the proceedings; a hymn was sung, and part of the congregation went out. Innocent made an anxious effort to go too, but the old woman stood immovable between her and the door, and the girl watched with agony the last figures retiring, and an evident movement to begin again taking place. “Let me go! Let me go!” she cried in her terror. The old woman clutched her shoulder with long, lean fingers, which looked like claws to the girl’s excited fancy. She approached her face to Innocent’s ear, and hoarsely whispered something which she did not understand. Innocent was half frantic with fear. She did not know what might be the next step. It seemed to her that other people were approaching her, and that she saw the gleam of knives, an idea which was natural enough to her Italian breeding. She uttered one loud shriek, and springing over into the pew in front rushed out of the chapel, pushing down someone in her passage. It seemed to her that she heard steps pursuing as she flew madly along the dimly-lighted road. She had taken the turn towards London in her bewilderment, and by the time she lost breath and was obliged to stop, had come to the verge of a greater thoroughfare, crowded and noisy. No one had come after her, though she had thought she heard steps resounding close behind. She stopped short, panting for breath; and, leaning against a wall, looked round her in dismay up at the dark sky, and down at the muddy road, and along the long line of dim lamps and passing figures, all strange, and without help for her. When the full sense of her helplessness, her loneliness, her desolation, burst upon her, she crouched down upon the pavement close to the wall, and burst into tears. “Niccolo! Niccolo!” she cried, with a wail of childish despair. Another girl in such circumstances would have called upon God or her mother; but Innocent knew nothing of her mother, and very little of God. The only being who had always been helpful to her was Niccolo. She called upon him with a bitter cry of helplessness. Niccolo in Pisa—how could he come to her? What could he do for her? But other help—less tender, less sure than Niccolo’s—was approaching slowly to her along the crowded way.

CHAPTER XVII.

FREDERICK TO THE RESCUE.

“Call me a cab,” he said to his amazed friend, and put out his hand to grasp, not very gently, at the old cloak which he recognized. “Heaven and earth! what has brought you here?” he said, in a tone of passion. The crouching figure uttered a cry, and, springing up at once, rushed upon him and clung to his arm.

“She’s found her young man at last,” said some one in the crowd; and the very policeman grinned as he cast the light of his lantern upon poor Innocent, who, pale and scared, and dazzled by the light, clung closer and closer to her cousin.

“Oh, Frederick, I lost my way. Take me home! take me home!” she cried piteously.

“Why did you ever leave home, you little fool?” he asked, and thrust her savagely into the cab which drove up. He threw a coin to the policeman, and waved a good-night to his companion. He did not give any explanation. It was better, he thought, to leave his friend to suppose that this was some adventure—some disreputable acquaintance whom he took the trouble to help, than to let him know who it really was whom he had found in such a position. But he was savage when he got into the cab, and thrust away the girl, who put out her trembling hands to cling to him once more.

“How can you be such an idiot?” he said. “Where next must I pick you out of? Do you know you are behaving like a shameless creature, and doubly like a fool? Did you come out after me? or why are you here, and where were you going? By heaven, it is enough to drive a man mad to see a girl making an idiot of herself like this!”

Poor Innocent could not stand against this torrent of reproof. She shrank back into a corner, and cried and sobbed. It seemed to her that heaven and earth had risen up against her, now that Frederick “scolded” her too. She had done no harm. But what an evening, what a round of miserable adventures she had gone through! Her limbs were aching with fatigue, and her mind with fright and terror. He had seemed to her the very messenger of heaven for her deliverance. Her cry when she saw him was one of those outcries of pure joy which sound keen and sharp as if a pang were in them. Out of the darkness, the forlornness, the utter misery, he appeared to her like an angel. But when the angel began to scold her, poor Innocent, muddy and wretched, shrank up into her corner. For the first time a consciousness of her own foolishness came across her mind. How could he, so spotless and smooth as he was, touch or look at her, with mud on her dress, with her old cloak wet with the rain, and her hair hanging limp and damp upon her shoulders? Yes, she deserved to be scolded: she perceived this for perhaps the first time in her life.

“When you have done crying,” said Frederick, still savage, “perhaps you will explain to me what ridiculous cause brought you to this plight. Have you run away entirely? Where were you going? What do you want! You little fool! They are far kinder to you at home than any one would be anywhere else. You would gain very little, I can tell you, by running away.”

“I did not mean to run away,” said Innocent, crying softly as it were, under her breath.

“You will find no other people so foolish,” said Frederick savagely. “What did you want? what were you thinking of? Good heavens! you are a girl, are you, and not a spirit of mischief? Fancy my dismay when I saw you—you, who ought to have been safe and sound at home, questioned by a policeman in the midst of a London crowd! Try and imagine how disgraceful such a thing is to yourself—how exasperating to me.”

“Oh, Frederick!” cried the girl, overwhelmed by his reproaches, and roused into understanding by the sharpness of the pain to which she was subjected, “I did not mean it. Do not be angry: it was not my fault——”

“Not your fault!” he cried in his rage. “Good heavens! if it had not been that I was afraid you might get into some still more disgraceful scrape, I should have left you to your fate. The thought did go through my mind. If this were known, nobody would ever speak to you again; nobody would believe your excuses. Not your fault! What made you come out at all, away from home?”

“Oh, don’t be angry,” she cried piteously, and put out her trembling hand to touch his coat, to propitiate and pacify him with abject self-humiliation. By this time his passion had begun to wear itself out, but he would not give her any sign of forgiveness. When the cab reached the gate of the Elms, it was thrown open to them by all the servants in a body, who were searching about among the shrubbery with lights.

“Oh, here she is, with Mr. Frederick. I know’d she’d be found with Mr. Frederick,” said one of the maids, whom Frederick overheard.

Mrs. Eastwood met them at the door, looking pale and frightened. “Oh, thank God, here she is at last!” she cried to Nelly, who was behind.

Innocent clutched tightly at Frederick’s arm as she stepped down, bewildered and dazzled by the lights that flashed everywhere around her. He had scolded her cruelly, but yet she clung to him in preference to the women who had been so kind to her. He felt the implied compliment, even in the midst of his wrath.

“Yes, I have brought the little fool home,” he cried loudly, that all might hear him. “Where do you think I found her? In the middle of the Brompton Road, with a crowd round, crying, and unable to tell where she came from. What were you thinking of, mother, to let such a child go out alone?”

“I! let her go out alone!” cried Mrs. Eastwood, astonished at the undeserved blame. “Are you mad, Frederick? I have been more unhappy about her than I can say. The gardener has gone out to look everywhere, and we have been all over the grounds with lanterns. But bring her in—bring her in. Thank God we have her safe at last!”

With the lights apparently flashing all round her, dazzling her eyes, Innocent went in, half dragged by Frederick, to whom she kept clinging. He pushed her roughly into a chair, pulling away his arm. “There! let us see if you can give any account of your escapade,” he said harshly.

The tones of his voice, his harsh words, sunk into poor Innocent’s heart like stones sinking into water. She remembered nothing else afterwards, and the pain seemed something more than she could bear. She sat and gazed at them all, holding her old faded cloak round her closely, and showing the stains of mud on it and upon her black frock. Her hair fell limp to her neck: her poor little hat was pushed back from her head. The excitement and distress threw out, as nothing before had done, the peculiar beauty of her face, but a more forlorn figure could not have been seen. Mrs. Eastwood was more anxious and more compassionate than her son.

“How was it, Innocent?” she asked: “I am sure you could not mean any harm. Tell me where were you going? where had you been?”

The girl sat silent, like one under a spell, eager yet dumb, on the point of utterance. She seemed to struggle with some force which prevented her from speaking. She turned her eyes from one to another, eager, miserable—trying, it seemed, to tell her story—incapable of beginning. At last she surmounted the spell, and burst suddenly into wild tears.

“I did not mean it. I saw the church from the window—I thought it was like the Spina. Oh—h! it was not a church at all: it was some dreadful place. They tried to kill me, and then I fled—fled! and I did not know the way——”

“What is the Spina?” said Mrs. Eastwood, wondering. “You frighten her, Frederick, making those grimaces. Innocent, no one will be hard upon you. Tell me plainly; what sort of a dreadful place was it? Why did you go?”

The girl looked round her at them all, one after another. Why did she go? She did not really understand the question, but it seemed to drive her to that necessity for an answer which sometimes brings the truth from our lips, and sometimes calls up an involuntary fiction which appears like truth to other minds, and sometimes to that of the speaker. “I was—lonely,” she said, after a long pause.

Mrs. Eastwood gave a cry of pain. She turned her back upon them all, and walked up and down the room two or three times with an agitation that no one understood. Then she came and stood by Innocent, and put one arm round her. “Oh, Nelly,” she cried, “Nelly, this is our fault!”

It would be wrong to say that Nelly was less tender-hearted than her mother, except in so far as youth is always less considerate, less tolerant than experience; but on this occasion she stood unmoved, feeling more indignant than sorry. She, too, had made her essay at sympathy, and she had not got the better of its rejection. She stood by without any particular demonstration, while by degrees some sort of account of the evening was got from her cousin. Innocent told them in broken words all that had happened to her. She shuddered as she described the groans. She was sure she had seen the gleam of the knives, and heard the steps approaching of the men who were going to kill her. This curious Italian version of a very commonplace incident puzzled the family greatly, to whose imaginations knives were quite strange and impossible things. When she had told her tale somehow, she sat, looking at them all, one after the other, with strained eyes, not knowing what they might do to her for the crime she seemed to have committed, without knowing it to be a crime. She did not catch the sense of what they said to each other, though her eyes followed every word, trying to divine it on the lips of the speaker.

“I was lonely,” she repeated, with a curious mixture of wistful misery, and the childish cunning of the perception that she had made a successful stroke with these words before.

The result, so far as Innocent was concerned, was that she was taken tenderly up-stairs, and committed to the care of Alice, who put her to bed, and questioned her over again, making her own reflections on the adventure. Innocent cried herself to sleep, sobbing while drowsiness crept over her, and waking up to sob again. The groans of the old woman in the chapel possessed her brain, and the strange black desolation of the streets, which every time she dropped asleep seemed to enfold her again, frightening her back out of the world of dreams to feel for the first time the soothing of the firelight, and the kindly warmth and comfort of her little room. These, however, were but superficial tortures. The one which gave them their hold upon her, and which had indeed produced a sort of half awakening of her spiritual nature, was the terrible disappointment of being “scolded” by Frederick. She knew no more tragical word to use, even in her own mind. He had forsaken her. She dwelt upon the fact with an acute pang, almost like the birth-pang of the soul which had not yet come to life within her. Almost, but not altogether—for the impulses of that high and potent inspiration of pain died off, when they reached the intolerable point, into vague childish moaning over an unexpected unkindness. Her only moral standing-ground in this vague uncertain world had failed her—Frederick had scolded her. The two things sound very different, yet in the feverish and confused musings of this poor undeveloped nature they were the same.

The party in the drawing-room were moved by very different feelings. The young people could not understand their mother. She had been crying, with her head bent down into her hands. To Nelly the incident was disagreeable and annoying, but not tragic; while to Frederick it had become chiefly an occasion of fault-finding. To think that it was somebody’s fault was a great relief to his mind.

“Why do you let her stray about as she likes? Why don’t you make her stay in the room with you? Why don’t you give her something to do? Surely there are people enough in the house to see that a child like that is not wandering about at her own will wherever she pleases?” he said.

This view of the subject relieved him from the indefinite uneasiness which had begun to steal into his mind as to his own sharp words to Innocent. He was quite right in using those sharp words. She must be made to see (he thought) that something more was required of her than to yield to every impulse—that she must learn, being a girl, to respect the limits which society draws around a girl’s path from her earliest beginning. She ought to have known them by instinct; but as she did not know them it was necessary she should be taught, and the sooner and more effectually the better. But, besides this, it was good to have somebody at home to blame for her foolishness. If she had been properly watched it could not have happened. Why did not some one keep her in their eye? Why not force her to remain with the others, if force was necessary? Why not—? There was no end to Frederick’s whys; everybody was wrong who had anything to do with the management of the girl; while he managed her, nothing of this sort had happened. But it was not in the nature of things that he could go on looking after a girl of sixteen—and the moment she got into the hands of the women, her natural guardians, this was the issue. It was just like women’s way—they wanted to do men’s work, and they would not take the trouble to do their own.

That Nelly should have accepted this challenge hotly and fiercely was natural enough; but Mrs. Eastwood took no notice. It was only when the discussion grew furious that she roused herself and interfered.

“Children,” she said, in her usual words, but with a more serious tone than usual, “don’t wrangle. It does not become you, Frederick, to speak against women who have brought you up, and done everything for you; and it is foolish of you, Nelly, to argue, as if it was a thing for argument. If Frederick thinks I am a fool, and you are a fool, seeing us every day as he does, and knowing all about us, what good will arguing do him?”

“I did not mean that, mother,” said Frederick, momentarily ashamed of himself.

“You said it, then, my dear, which is a very common thing among men,” said Mrs. Eastwood, “and curious when you come to think of it. But, as I say, talk will not change any one’s opinion. And here is something very much more serious to call for our attention. Something must be done about Innocent. Her mother made me very unhappy when I was young. She was not affectionate either. She was secret; nobody could ever make sure what was going on in her mind. When she ran away and married Mr. Vane, none of us had the least suspicion of what was going on. I am afraid of Innocent doing something of the same kind.”

“Running away and marrying—some one?” asked Frederick. An ineffable smile of secret complacency came over the young man’s face. He gave a short little laugh of pleased embarrassment. “I think you may feel yourself safe against any such danger. Running away—or, at least, marrying—requires two——”

Mrs. Eastwood and Nelly looked at each other with secret feminine indignation, thus relieving their minds; but the mother replied, with a composure which she was far from feeling,—

“There are more ways of going wrong than making a foolish marriage. That is very wrong, Heaven knows; when you consider how much the very character of the family and its standing in the world depends upon the wife whom a young man may marry in a sudden fancy——”

“If you are referring to me, mother,” said Frederick, catching fire, “you may make yourself perfectly easy. I look upon Innocent as a mere child. It seems to me a kind of insult to suppose for a moment that I could be capable——”

“Of running away with Innocent?” said his mother, looking him calmly in the face. “Be comforted, Frederick; I never imagined that you were likely so to compromise yourself. The danger I warned you against was of a very different kind.—But we need not return to that. Nobody can say you have been too kind to her to-night.”

“I am not sentimental,” he cried, getting up from his chair, and glad of the excuse for being angry, and withdrawing from unpleasant discussion. He went off, whistling an opera air, to show his perfect indifference, and was heard next moment pitching coals on the fire in the library, and wheeling the chairs about violently, to get himself the most comfortable place. This Sunday night was not so peaceable as a Sunday night ought to be in a respectable English household, which strove to do its duty. Dick came in immediately after Frederick’s withdrawal, with muddy boots, and rain on his rough coat, but his cheeks pink with the cold air outside, and the serenity of an easy mind in his good-natured countenance. Dick seldom wrangled, and never allowed any event to disturb him very deeply. His honest matter-of-fact character was always a comfort, whatever went wrong.

“So she has come back?” he said; “that’s a blessing. I went as far as Piccadilly without seeing anything of her. I say, weren’t they making a row in that little chapel in the road—groaning as if they’d groan their heads off. Had Innocent gone after Frederick, as the maids say? or where had she been?”

Dick was much amused when they told him the facts of the case, and saw great possibilities of laughter in the idea.

“I say, what jolly fun!” he cried—“thought they were going to kill her? Oh, oh, oh! What a stupid I was not to go in. Poor little soul though, I hope you didn’t scold her—not more than you could help, mamma! I suppose it’s right to scold—to a certain point—but she’s so scared and so bewildered.”

“And you are my own good Dick,” cried his mother, giving him a kiss, which the boy did not understand.

“Well, I’m glad to hear it,” he said, with a brightening of pleasure, “though hang me if I know why. Ain’t I muddy, rather! You never saw such a night. Honest fog is a joke to it. Drizzle, drizzle for ever; and the sky is so low you could touch it. I’m glad she’s in all right, and safe in bed; and I hope you didn’t whip her. If I am to be up at seven to those dear mathematics,” Dick added, making a face, “I suppose I had better go to bed too——”

“And don’t forget to get up when you are called, dear,” said Mrs. Eastwood; “and do work, there’s a good boy. I am sure you have plenty of brains, if you will only take the trouble.”

Dick shrugged his shoulders, as he went off cheerful after his long walk. I don’t know that his brains were at all superabundant; and he was not fond of work; but after the clever and refined Frederick the very sight of this honest fellow, weighted to the ground as he was by the burden of the coming Exam., was a consolation to everybody belonging to him. The mother and daughter had a final consultation before they too left the drawing-room. There had to be beer ordered for the gardener, who came in much more overwhelmed by the fatigue of his bootless walk than Dick was, depressed about things in general, and taking a dark view of Innocent’s prospects in particular.

“Gentlemen don’t like to be followed about like that,” he said oracularly, “no more nor I would myself. Women should know as their place is at ’ome, and make up their minds to it.”

This, it is true, was said down-stairs to a sympathetic housemaid; but, being an old servant, the gardener felt that he might unfold his mind a little, even to his mistress.

“I’d give the young lady a word, mum,” he said, strong in his own sense of injury, as having lost his Sunday evening’s ease and leisure through her means. “I’d let her know, whatever may be furrin’ ways, as this sort o’ thing won’t do—not in England. It ain’t the thing for a young gell. In furrin’ parts there’s many ways as ain’t like ours—so I’m told—dancing all over the place of Sundays, and that sort; but not to be hard upon her the first time, nor nothing violent, I’d jest give her a word—that it won’t do, not here.”

“You may be sure I will say all that is necessary,” said Mrs. Eastwood, half laughing, half angry. “My niece went out to go to church, and went to the little chapel in the road, and got frightened, poor child. That is the whole matter.”

“Ah, ma’am, you’re a simple ’earted one,” said the man, shaking his head with a scepticism that no asseveration could have touched.

The maids, too, were of opinion that Mrs. Eastwood was a very simple ’earted one; though not where they themselves were concerned. She had not the same faith in their excuses as she seemed to put in this patent deception attempted by “the French girl,” who was a likely one to get into trouble by going to church surely. The kitchen and all its dependencies laughed the idea to scorn, though, perhaps, respecting Innocent more for the cleverness and invention she had displayed in finding out such an excuse. But the story was laid up against her, with a fulness of detail and circumstance such as might have made an historian despair. How she followed Frederick to his dinner-party, and watched him through the window, and went after him to the club, was all known to the housemaid as particularly as if she had been there.

“And I hope he’ll reward her, when he’s free and can please hisself,” said Jane in the kitchen, who was romantic.

“Get along with you,” cried the cook. “Do you think gentlemen care for a chit like that?”

“And one as follows ’em about,” said Susan solemnly, whose younger sister Jane was.