d 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
she's queer,--very queer, at times!"

"I'm sorry to hear that."

"Yes: there; wives be such a provoking class o' society, because though
they be never right, they be never more than half wrong."

Fancy seemed uneasy under the infliction of this household moralizing,
which might tend to damage the airy-fairy nature that Dick, as maiden
shrewdness told her, had accredited her with. Her dead silence impressed
Geoffrey with the notion that something in his words did not agree with
her educated ideas, and he changed the conversation.

"Did Fred Shiner send the cask o' drink, Fancy?"

"I think he did: O yes, he did."

"Nice solid feller, Fred Shiner!" said Geoffrey to Dick as he helped
himself to gravy, bringing the spoon round to his plate by way of the
potato-dish, to obviate a stain on the cloth in the event of a spill.

Now Geoffrey's eyes had been fixed upon his plate for the previous four
or five minutes, and in removing them he had only carried them to the
spoon, which, from its fulness and the distance of its transit,
necessitated a steady watching through the whole of the route. Just as
intently as the keeper's eyes had been fixed on the spoon, Fancy's had
been fixed on her father's, without premeditation or the slightest phase
of furtiveness; but there they were fastened. This was the reason why:

Dick was sitting next to her on the right side, and on the side of the
table opposite to her father. Fancy had laid her right hand lightly down
upon the table-clo