t too
that here they were at a house that seemed not large, but in the fresh
white front of which the street-lamp showed a smartness of flower-boxes.
The child had been in thousands of stories--all Mrs. Wix's and her own,
to say nothing of the richest romances of French Elise--but she had
never been in such a story as this. By the time he had helped her out
of the cab, which drove away, and she heard in the door of the house
the prompt little click of his key, the Arabian Nights had quite closed
round her.

From this minute that pitch of the wondrous was in everything,
particularly in such an instant "Open Sesame" and in the departure of
the cab, a rattling void filled with relinquished step-parents; it was,
with the vividness, the almost blinding whiteness of the light that
sprang responsive to papa's quick touch of a little brass knob on the
wall, in a place that, at the top of a short soft staircase, struck her
as the most beautiful she had ever seen in her life. The next thing she
perceived it to be was the drawing-room of a lady--of a lady, she could
see in a moment, and not of a gentleman, not even of one like papa
himself or even like Sir Claude--whose things were as much prettier than
mamma's as it had always had to be confessed that mamma's were prettier
than Mrs. Beale's. In the middle of the small bright room and the
presence of more curtains and cushions, more pictures and mirrors, more
palm-trees drooping over brocaded and gilded nooks, more little silver
boxes scattered over little crooked tables and little oval miniatures
hooked upon velvet screens than Mrs. Beale and her ladyship together
could, in an unnatural alliance, have dreamed of mustering, the child
became aware, with a sharp foretaste of compassion, of something that
was strangely like a relegation to obscurity of each of those women of
taste. It was a stranger operation still that her father should on the
spot be presented to her as quite advantageously and even grandly at
home in the dazzling scene and himself by so much the more separated
from scenes inferior to it. She spent with him in it, while explanations
continued to hang back, twenty minutes that, in their sudden drop of
danger, affected her, though there were neither buns nor ginger-beer,
like an extemporised expensive treat.

"Is she very rich?" He had begun to strike her as almost embarrassed, so
shy that he might have found himself with a young lady with whom he had
little in com