enjoy at periods a protection that she paid for by helping, among other
services, to show the place and explain it, deal with the tiresome
people, answer questions about the dates of the building, the styles of
the furniture, the authorship of the pictures, the favourite haunts of
the ghost? It wasn't that she looked as if you could have given her
shillings--it was impossible to look less so. Yet when she finally
drifted toward him, distinctly handsome, though ever so much older--older
than when he had seen her before--it might have been as an effect of her
guessing that he had, within the couple of hours, devoted more
imagination to her than to all the others put together, and had thereby
penetrated to a kind of truth that the others were too stupid for. She
_was_ there on harder terms than any one; she was there as a consequence
of things suffered, one way and another, in the interval of years; and
she remembered him very much as she was remembered--only a good deal
better.

By the time they at last thus came to speech they were alone in one of
the rooms--remarkable for a fine portrait over the chimney-place--out of
which their friends had passed, and the charm of it was that even before
they had spoken they had practically arranged with each other to stay
behind for talk. The charm, happily, was in other things too--partly in
there being scarce a spot at Weatherend without something to stay behind
for. It was in the way the autumn day looked into the high windows as it
waned; the way the red light, breaking at the close from under a low
sombre sky, reached out in a long shaft and played over old wainscots,
old tapestry, old gold, old colour. It was most of all perhaps in the
way she came to him as if, since she had been turned on to deal with the
simpler sort, he might, should he choose to keep the whole thing down,
just take her mild attention for a part of her general business. As soon
as he heard her voice, however, the gap was filled up and the missing