, and let him talk as she listened with the tenderest
kindly interest, sitting by him, and hemming a shirt for her dear
little boy. Whenever Mrs. Rawdon wished to be particularly humble and
virtuous, this little shirt used to come out of her work-box. It had
got to be too small for Rawdon long before it was finished.

Well, Rebecca listened to Pitt, she talked to him, she sang to him, she
coaxed him, and cuddled him, so that he found himself more and more
glad every day to get back from the lawyer's at Gray's Inn, to the
blazing fire in Curzon Street--a gladness in which the men of law
likewise participated, for Pitt's harangues were of the longest--and so
that when he went away he felt quite a pang at departing. How pretty
she looked kissing her hand to him from the carriage and waving her
handkerchief when he had taken his place in the mail! She put the
handkerchief to her eyes once. He pulled his sealskin cap over his, as
the coach drove away, and, sinking back, he thought to himself how she
respected him and how he deserved it, and how Rawdon was a foolish dull
fellow who didn't half-appreciate his wife; and how mum and stupid his
own wife was compared to that brilliant little Becky. Becky had hinted
every one of these things herself, perhaps, but so delicately and
gently that you hardly knew when or where. And, before they parted, it
was agreed that the house in London should be redecorated for the next
season, and that the brothers' families should meet again in the
country at Christmas.

"I wish you could have got a little money out of him," Rawdon said to
his wife moodily when the Baronet was gone. "I should like to give
something to old Raggles, hanged if I shouldn't. It ain't right, you
know, that the old fellow should be kept out of all his money. It may
be inconvenient, and he might let to somebody else besides us, you
know."

"Tell him," said Becky, "that as soon as Sir Pitt's affairs are
settled, everybody will be paid, and give him a little something on
account. Here's a cheque that Pitt left for the boy," and she took
from her bag and gave her husband a paper which his brother had handed
over to her, on behalf of the little son and heir of the younger branch
of the Crawleys.

The truth is, she had tried personally the ground on which her husband
expressed a wish that she should venture--tried it ever so delicately,
and found it unsafe. Even at a hint about embarrassments, Sir Pitt
Crawley w