Laetitia pondered on an obscurity in these words which would have accused her thick intelligence but for a glimmer it threw on another most obscure communication.  She feared it might be, strange though it seemed, jealousy, a shade of jealousy affecting Miss Middleton, as had been vaguely intimated by Sir Willoughby when they were waiting in the hall.  “A little feminine ailment, a want of comprehension of a perfect friendship;” those were his words to her:  and he suggested vaguely that care must be taken in the eulogy of her friend.

She resolved to be explicit.

“I have not said that I think him beyond criticism, Miss Middleton.”

“Noble?”

“He has faults.  When we have known a person for years the faults come out, but custom makes light of them; and I suppose we feel flattered by seeing what it would be difficult to be blind to!  A very little flatters us!  Now, do you not admire that view?  It is my favourite.”

Clara gazed over rolling richness of foliage, wood and water, and a church-spire, a town and horizon hills.  There sung a sky-lark.

“Not even the bird that does not fly away!” she said; meaning, she had no heart for the bird satisfied to rise and descend in this place.

Laetitia travelled to some notion, dim and immense, of Miss Middleton’s fever of distaste.  She shrunk from it in a kind of dread lest it might be contagious and rob her of her one ever-fresh possession of the homely picturesque; but Clara melted her by saying, “For your sake I could love it . . . in time; or some dear old English scene.  Since . . . since this . . . this change in me, I find I cannot separate landscape from associations.  Now I learn how youth goes.  I have grown years older in a week.—­Miss Dale, if he were to give me my freedom? if he were to cast me off? if he stood alone?”

“I should pity him.”

“Him—­not me!  Oh! right!  I hoped you would; I knew you would.”

Laetitia’s attempt to shift with Miss Middleton’s shiftiness was vain; for now she seemed really listening to the language of Jealousy:—­jealous of the ancient Letty Dale—­and immediately before the tone was quite void of it.

“Yes,” she said, “but you make me feel myself in the dark, and when I do I have the habit of throwing myself for guidance upon such light as I have within.  You shall know me, if you will, as well as I know myself.  And do not think me far from the point when I say I have a feeble health.  I am what the doctors call anaemic; a rather bloodless creature.  The blood is life, so I have not much life.  Ten years back—­eleven, if I must be precise, I thought of conquering the world with a pen!  The result is that I am glad of a fireside, and not sure of always having one:  and that is my achievement.  My days are monotonous, but if I have a dread, it is that there will be an alteration in them.  My father has very little money.  We subsist on what private income he has,