approve in London. She had sat all evening mute in her corner, for
Miss Leaf would not send her away into the terra incognita of a
London hotel. Ascott, at first considerably annoyed at the presence
of what he called a "skeleton at the feast," had afterward got over
it; and run on with a mixture of childish glee and mannish pomposity
about his plans and intentions--how he meant to take a house, he
thought, in one of the squares, or a street leading out of them: how
he would put up the biggest of brass plates, with "Mr. Leaf,
surgeon." and soon get an extensive practice, and have all his aunts
to live with him. And his aunts had smiled and listened, forgetting
all about the silent figure in the corner, who perhaps had gone to
sleep, or had also listened.

"Elizabeth, come and look out at London."

So she and Miss Hilary whiled away another heavy three quarters of an
hour in watching and commenting on the incessantly shifting crowd
which swept past Holborn Bars. Miss Selina sometimes looked out too,
but more often sat fidgeting and wondering why Ascott did not come;
while Miss Leaf, who never fidgeted, became gradually more and more
silent. Her eyes were fixed on the door, with an expression which, if
Hilary could have remembered so far back, would have been to her
something not painfully new, but still more painfully old--a look
branded into her face by many an anxious hour's listening for the
footstep that never came, or only came to bring distress. It was the
ineffaceable token of that long, long struggle between affection and
conscience, pity and scarcely repressible contempt, which, for more
than one generation, had been the appointed burden of this family--at
least the women of it--till sometimes it seemed to hang over them
almost like a fate.