"Happier? Nonsense! I am as happy as I can be. Six pupils already. To
be sure I have lost one," she sighed; "and the best among them all."

When her grandfather left her, Iris placed candles on the
writing-table, but did not light them, though it was already pretty
dark. She had half an hour to wait; and she wanted to think, and
candles are not necessary for meditation. She sat at the open window
and suffered her thoughts to ramble where they pleased. This is a
restful thing to do, especially if your windows look upon a tolerably
busy but not noisy London road. For then, it is almost as good as
sitting beside a swiftly-running stream; the movement of the people
below is like the unceasing flow of the current; the sound of the
footsteps is like the whisper of the water along the bank; the echo of
the half heard talk strikes your ear like the mysterious voices wafted
to the banks from the boats as they go by; and the lights of the shops
and the street presently become spectral and unreal like lights seen
upon the river in the evening.

Iris had a good many pupils--six, in fact, as she had boasted; why,
then, was she so strangely disturbed on account of one?

An old tutor by correspondence may be, and very likely is, indifferent
about his pupils, because he has had so many; but Iris was a young
tutor, and had as yet known few. One of her pupils, for instance, was
a gentleman in the fruit and potato line, in the Borough. By reason of
his early education, which had not been neglected so much as entirely
omitted, he was unable to personally conduct his accounts. Now a
merchant without his accounts is as helpless as a tourist without his
Cook. So that he desired, in his mature age, to learn book keeping,
compound addition, subtraction, and multiplication. He had no