ot easy to resist
showing that she was on more familiar terms with him than all. But the
instinct of self-protection and the wisdom of sincerity came to her
aid. She abstained from raising her eyes to his face, from one
conscious word or glance; she locked herself into her pantry when she
took down the breakfast-things, and avoided every encounter, even when
she had begun to feel that it would have been more flattering had he
made more efforts. At last, dire necessity obliged her to accept his
aid in carrying her mistress's box down the stairs. He walked
backwards, she forwards. She would not meet his eye, and he was too
well-bred for one word on the stairs; but in the garden he exclaimed,
'Miss Arnold, what have I done?'

'I never ought to have listened to you,' said Charlotte. 'It was not
right by neither of us; so please say no more.'

'If you could understand--'

'I don't want to understand nothing.'

Charlotte drove him on with the box till they were close to the fly,
and then, leaving him and the man to adjust the packing, flew back to
announce that all was ready for her mistress. The last kisses were
given to the children, and a message left with Charlotte for her
master, who was in school; then she stood with Miss Catharine in her
arms, and saw the fly drive off.

'Well,' said Mrs. Cook, 'that butler thinks himself a great beau, no
doubt! I asked him whether he thought you pretty, Charlotte, and he
said you hadn't no air nor no complexion. It's as I tells you--nobody
will never take no notice of you while you goes about so dowdy.'

Charlotte did not know whether she was glad that the cook could not
tease her about Delaford, or mortified to be supposed beneath his
notice. No air, forsooth! She who had often heard it said that she
looked like any lady!

'But oh,' said Charlotte to herself, as she spent her daily five
minutes at noonday in quiet thought, 'am I not a poor silly thing not
to be thankful that care has been round me this time, and that I have
not been let to do nothing giddy nor false by Tom, whatever I may have
thought!'

Meanwhile, Isabel had found it much harder to part with her babies for
three weeks than it had seemed at the first proposal; and there were
tears in her eyes as she gazed at the peaked, red-tiled roof of the old
grammar-school, and reckoned the days and hours before her husband
would join her.

Other associations revived when she found herself at Estminster, an