Tom consoled her, in his careless but affectionate way; and another silent consolation was the “little bits of things,” bought out of her additional wages, which she began to put by in her box—­sticks and straws for the new sweet nest that was a-building:  a metal teapot, two neat glass salt-cellars, and, awful extravagance!—­two real second-hand silver spoons—­Tom did so like having things nice about him!  These purchases, picked up at stray times, were solid, substantial and useful; domestic rather than personal; and all with a view to Tom rather than herself.  She hid them with a magpie-like closeness, for Esther and she shared the same room; but sometimes when Esther was asleep she would peep at them with an anxious, lingering tenderness, as if they made more of an assured reality what even now seemed so very like a dream.

—­Except, indeed, on those Sunday nights when Tom and she went to church together and afterward took a walk, but always parted at the corner of the square.  She never brought him in to the house, nor spoke of him to her fellow servants.  How much they guessed of her engagement she neither knew nor cared.

Mrs. Ascott, too, had apparently quite forgotten it.  She seemed to take as little interest in her servants’ affairs as they in hers.

Nevertheless, ignorant as the lower regions were in general of what was passing in the upper, occasionally rumors began to reach the kitchen that “Master had been a-blowing up Missis, rather!” And once, after the solemn dinner, with three footmen to wait on two people, was over, Elizabeth, passing through the hall, caught the said domestics laughing together, and saying it was “as good as a play; cat and dog was nothing to it.”  After which “the rows up stairs” became a favorite joke in the servants’ hall.

But still Mr. Ascott went out daily after breakfast, and came home to dinner; and Mrs. Ascott spent the morning in her private sitting room, or “boudoir,” as she called it; lunched, and drove out in her handsome carriage, with her footman behind; dressed elegantly for dinner, and presided at her own table with an air of magnificent satisfaction in all things.  She had perfectly accommodated herself to her new position; and if under her satins and laces beat a solitary, dissatisfied, or aching heart, it was nobody’s business but her own.  At least, she kept up the splendid sham with a most creditable persistency.

But all shams are dangerous things.  Be the surface ever so smooth and green, it will crack sometimes, and a faint wreath of smoke betray the inward volcano.  The like had happened once or twice, as on the day when the men-servants were so intensely amused.  Also Elizabeth, when putting in order her mistress’s bedroom, which was about the hour Mr. Ascott left for the city, had several times seen Mrs. Ascott come in there suddenly, white and trembling.  Once, so agitated was she, that Elizabeth had brought her a glass of water; and instead of being angry or treating her with the distant dignity which she had always kept up her mistress had said, almost in the old Stowbury tone, “Thank you, Elizabeth.”