there was a kind of substitute for conversation in
the click and play of its pegs, Barbox Brothers took the opportunity of
observing her. He guessed her to be thirty. The charm of her
transparent face and large bright brown eyes, was, not that they were
passively resigned, but that they were actively and thoroughly cheerful.
Even her busy hands, which of their own thinness alone might have
besought compassion, plied their task with a gay courage that made mere
compassion an unjustifiable assumption of superiority, and an
impertinence.

He saw her eyes in the act of rising towards his, and he directed his
towards the prospect, saying: "Beautiful indeed!"

"Most beautiful, sir. I have sometimes had a fancy that I would like to
sit up, for once, only to try how it looks to an erect head. But what a
foolish fancy that would be to encourage! It cannot look more lovely to
any one than it does to me."

Her eyes were turned to it as she spoke, with most delighted admiration
and enjoyment. There was not a trace in it of any sense of deprivation.

"And those threads of railway, with their puffs of smoke and steam
changing places so fast, make it so lively for me," she went on. "I
think of the number of people who _can_ go where they wish, on their
business, or their pleasure; I remember that the puffs make signs to me
that they are actually going while I look; and that enlivens the prospect
with abundance of company, if I want company. There is the great
Junction, too. I don't see it under the foot of the hill, but I can very
often hear it, and I always know it is there. It seems to join me, in a
way, to I don't know how many places and things that _I_ shall never
see."

With an abashed kind of idea that it might have already joined himself to
something he had never seen, he said constrainedly: "Just so."

"And so you see, sir," pursued Phoebe, "I am not the invalid you thought
me, and I am very well off indeed."

"You have a happy disposition," said Barbox Brothers: perhaps with a
slight excusatory touch for his own disposition.

"Ah! But you should know my father," she replied. "His is the happy
disposition!--Don't mind, sir!" For his reserve took the alarm at a step
upon the stairs, and he distrusted that he would be set down for a
troublesome intruder. "This is my father coming."

The door opened, and the father paused there.

"Why, Lamps!" exclaimed Barbox Brothers, starting from his chair. "How
d