as himself; and they all sat down. Dick could have wished her manner had
not been so entirely free from all apparent consciousness of those
accidental meetings of theirs: but he let the thought pass. Enoch sat
diagonally at a table afar off, under the corner cupboard, and drank his
cider from a long perpendicular pint cup, having tall fir-trees done in
brown on its sides. He threw occasional remarks into the general tide of
conversation, and with this advantage to himself, that he participated in
the pleasures of a talk (slight as it was) at meal-times, without
saddling himself with the responsibility of sustaining it.

"Why don't your stap-mother come down, Fancy?" said Geoffrey. "You'll
excuse her, Mister Dick, she's a little queer sometimes."

"O yes,--quite," said Richard, as if he were in the habit of excusing
people every day.

"She d'belong to that class of womankind that become second wives: a rum
class rather."

"Indeed," said Dick, with sympathy for an indefinite something.

"Yes; and 'tis trying to a female, especially if you've been a first
wife, as she hev."

"Very trying it must be."

"Yes: you see her first husband was a young man, who let her go too far;
in fact, she used to kick up Bob's-a-dying at the least thing in the
world. And when I'd married her and found it out, I thought, thinks I,
''Tis too late now to begin to cure 'e;' and so I let her bide. But