She had tried to ease her mind by arranging and rearranging the furniture—­regular lodging house furniture—­table, six chairs, horse-hair sofa, a what not, and the chiffonnier, with a tea-caddy upon it, of which the respective keys had been solemnly presented to Miss Hilary.  But still the parlor looked homeless and bare; and the yellowish paper on the walls, the large patterned, many colored Kidderminster on the floor, gave an involuntary sense of discomfort and dreariness.  Besides, No. 15 was on the shady side of the street—­cheap lodgings always are; and no one who has not lived in the like lodgings—­not a house—­can imagine what it is to inhabit perpetually one room where the sunshine just peeps in for an hour a day, and vanishes by eleven A. M.; leaving behind in winter a chill dampness, and in summer a heavy, dusty atmosphere, that weighs like lead on the spirits in spite of one’s self.  No wonder that, as is statistically known and proved, cholera stalks, fever rages, and the registrar’s list is always swelled along the shady side of a London street.

Elizabeth felt this, though she had not the dimmest idea why.  She stood watching the sunset light fade out of the topmost windows of the opposite house—­ghostly reflection of some sunset over fields and trees far away; and she listened to the long monotonous cry melting away round the crescent, and beginning again at the other end of the street—­“Straw-berries—­straw-ber-ries!” Also, with an eye to tomorrow’s Sunday dinner, she investigated the cart of the tired costermonger, who crawled along beside his equally tired donkey, reiterating at times, in tones hoarse with a day’s bawling, his dreary “Cauli-flower!  Cauli-flower!—­Fine new pease, sixpence peck!”

But, alas! the pease were neither fine nor new; and the cauliflowers were regular Saturday night’s cauliflowers.  Besides, Elizabeth suddenly doubted whether she had any right, unordered, to buy these things which, from being common garden necessaries, had become luxuries.  This thought, with some others that it occasioned, her unwonted state of Idleness and the dullness of every thing about her—­what is so dull as a “quiet” London street on a summer evening?—­actually made Elizabeth stand, motionless and meditative, for a quarter of an hour.  Then she started to hear two cabs drive up to the door; the “family” had at length arrived.

Ascott was there too.  Two new portmanteaus and a splendid hat-box east either ignominy or glory upon the poor Stowbury luggage; and—­Elizabeth’s sharp eye noticed—­there was also his trunk which she had seen lying detained for rent in his Gower Street lodgings.  But he looked quite easy and comfortable:  handed out his Aunt Johanna, commanded the luggage about, and paid the cabmen with such a magnificent air, that they touched their bats to him, and winked at one another as much as to say.  “That’s a real gentleman!”

In which statement the landlady evidently coincided, and courtesied low when Miss Leaf introducing him as “my nephew,” hoped that a room could be found for him.  Which at last there was, by his appropriating Miss Leaf’s, while she and Hilary took that at the top of the house.  But they agreed, Ascott must have a good airy room to study in.