onciled him to the change. So there was a radical 'move;' the
two ladies staying at Torquay as had been arranged, the vicar going to
and fro.

Mrs. Swancourt considerably enlarged Elfride's ideas in an aristocratic
direction, and she began to forgive her father for his politic marriage.
Certainly, in a worldly sense, a handsome face at three-and-forty had
never served a man in better stead.

The new house at Kensington was ready, and they were all in town.

The Hyde Park shrubs had been transplanted as usual, the chairs ranked
in line, the grass edgings trimmed, the roads made to look as if they
were suffering from a heavy thunderstorm; carriages had been called for
by the easeful, horses by the brisk, and the Drive and Row were again
the groove of gaiety for an hour. We gaze upon the spectacle, at six
o'clock on this midsummer afternoon, in a melon-frame atmosphere and
beneath a violet sky. The Swancourt equipage formed one in the stream.

Mrs. Swancourt was a talker of talk of the incisive kind, which her low
musical voice--the only beautiful point in the old woman--prevented from
being wearisome.

'Now,' she said to Elfride, who, like AEneas at Carthage, was full
of admiration for the brilliant scene, 'you will find that our
companionless state will give us, as it does everybody, an extraordinary
power in reading the features of our fellow-creatures here. I always
am a listener in such places as these--not to the narratives told by my
neighbours' tongues, but by their faces--the advantage of which is, that
whether I am in Row, Boulevard, Rialto, or Prado, they all speak the
same language. I may have acquired some skill in this practice through
having been an ugly lonely woman for so many years, with nobody to give
me information; a thing you will not consider strange when the parallel
case is borne in mind,--how truly people who have no clocks will tell
the time of day.'

'Ay, that they will,' said Mr. Swancourt corroboratively. 'I have known
labouring men at Endelstow and other farms who had framed complete
systems of observation for that purpose. By means of shadows, winds,
clouds, the movements of sheep and oxen, the singing of birds, the
crowing of cocks, and a hundred other sights and sounds which people
with watches in their pockets never know the existence of, they are
able to pronounce within ten minutes of the hour almost at any required
instant. That reminds me of an old story which I'm afraid is to