When this was read to the boarders, the young man John said he should like a chance to “step up” to a figger of that kind, if the girl was one of the right sort.

The landlady said them that merried for money didn’t deserve the blessin’ of a good wife.  Money was a great thing when them that had it made a good use of it.  She had seen better days herself, and knew what it was never to want for anything.  One of her cousins merried a very rich old gentleman, and she had heerd that he said he lived ten year longer than if he’d staid by himself without anybody to take care of him.  There was nothin’ like a wife for nussin’ sick folks and them that couldn’t take care of themselves.

The young man John got off a little wink, and pointed slyly with his thumb in the direction of our diminutive friend, for whom he seemed to think this speech was intended.

If it was meant for him, he did n’t appear to know that it was.  Indeed, he seems somewhat listless of late, except when the conversation falls upon one of those larger topics that specially interest him, and then he grows excited, speaks loud and fast, sometimes almost savagely,—­and, I have noticed once or twice, presses his left hand to his right side, as if there were something that ached, or weighed, or throbbed in that region.

While he speaks in this way, the general conversation is interrupted, and we all listen to him.  Iris looks steadily in his face, and then he will turn as if magnetized and meet the amber eyes with his own melancholy gaze.  I do believe that they have some kind of understanding together, that they meet elsewhere than at our table, and that there is a mystery, which is going to break upon us all of a sudden, involving the relations of these two persons.  From the very first, they have taken to each other.  The one thing they have in common is the heroic will.  In him, it shows itself in thinking his way straightforward, in doing battle for “free trade and no right of search” on the high seas of religious controversy, and especially in fighting the battles of his crooked old city.  In her, it is standing up for her little friend with the most queenly disregard of the code of boarding-house etiquette.  People may say or look what they like,—­she will have her way about this sentiment of hers.

The Poor Relation is in a dreadful fidget whenever the Little Gentleman says anything that interferes with her own infallibility.  She seems to think Faith must go with her face tied up, as if she had the toothache,—­and that if she opens her mouth to the quarter the wind blows from, she will catch her “death o’ cold.”

The landlady herself came to him one day, as I have found out, and tried to persuade him to hold his tongue.—­The boarders was gettin’ uneasy,—­she said,—­and some of ’em would go, she mistrusted, if he talked any more about things that belonged to the ministers to settle.  She was a poor woman, that had known better days, but all her livin’ depended on her boarders, and she was sure there was n’t any of ’em she set so much by as she did by him; but there was them that never liked to hear about sech things, except on Sundays.