“You never do except when you are wished to be silent; and then your tongue goes like any race horse.”

“Does it?  Well, like Gilpin’s,

    ’It carries weight:  it rides a race,
    ‘Tis for a thousand pound?’

—­and I only wish it were.  Heigh ho! if I could but earn a thousand pounds!”

Selina was too vexed to reply and for five quiet minutes Hilary bent over her Homer which Mr. Lyon had taken such pleasure in teaching her, because he said, she learned it faster than any of his grammar school boys.  She had forgotten all domestic grievances in a vision of Thetis and the water nymphs; and was repeating to herself, first in the sonorous Greek and then in Pope’s small but sweet English, that catalogue of oceanic beauties ending with

    “Black Janira and Janassa fair,
    And Amatheia with her amber hair.”

“Black, did you say?  I’m sure she was as black as a chimney sweep all to-day.  And her pinafore”

“Her what?  Oh, Elizabeth, you mean—­”

“Her pinafore had three rents in it, which she never thinks of mending though I gave her needles and thread myself a week ago.  But she does not know how to use them any more than a baby.”

“Possibly, nobody ever taught her.”

“Yes; she went for a year to the National School, she says, and learned both marking and sewing.”

“Perhaps she has never practiced them since.  She could hardly have had time, with all the little Hands to look after, as her mother says she did.  All the better for us.  It makes her wonderfully patient with our troublesome brats.  It was only to day, when that horrid little Jacky Smith hurt himself so, that I saw Elizabeth take him into the kitchen, wash his face and hands, and cuddle him up and comfort him, quite motherly.  Her forte is certainly children.”

“You always find something to say for her.”

“I should be ashamed if I could not find something to say for any body who is always abused.”

Another pause—­and then Selina returned to the charge.

“Have you ever observed, my dear, the extraordinary way she has of fastening, or rather, not fastening her gown behind?  She just hooks it together at the top and at the waist, while between there is a—­”

“Hiatus valde deflendus.  Oh dear me! what shall I do?  Selina, how can I help it if a girl of fifteen years old is not a paragon of perfection? as of course we all are, if we only could find it out.”

And Hilary, in despair, rose to carry her candle and books into the chilly but quiet bedroom, biting her lips the while lest she should be tempted to say something which Selina called “impertinent,” which perhaps it was, from a younger sister to an elder.  I do not set Hilary up as a perfect character.  Through sorrow only do people go on to perfection; and sorrow, in its true meaning, the cherished girl had never known.

But that night, talking to Johanna before they went to sleep—­they had always slept together since the time when the elder sister used to walk the room of nights with that pulling, motherless infant in her arms—­Hilary anxiously started the question of the little servant.