p-stairs was a very clean white room with a low roof. Its only
inmate lay on a couch that brought her face on a level with the window.
The couch was white too; and her simple dress or wrapper being light
blue, like the band around her hair, she had an ethereal look, and a
fanciful appearance of lying among clouds. He felt that she
instinctively perceived him to be by habit a downcast taciturn man; it
was another help to him to have established that understanding so easily,
and got it over.

There was an awkward constraint upon him, nevertheless, as he touched her
hand, and took a chair at the side of her couch.

"I see now," he began, not at all fluently, "how you occupy your hands.
Only seeing you from the path outside, I thought you were playing upon
something."

She was engaged in very nimbly and dexterously making lace. A
lace-pillow lay upon her breast; and the quick movements and changes of
her hands upon it as she worked, had given them the action he had
misinterpreted.

"That is curious," she answered, with a bright smile. "For I often
fancy, myself, that I play tunes while I am at work."

"Have you any musical knowledge?"

She shook her head.

"I think I could pick out tunes, if I had any instrument, which could be
made as handy to me as my lace-pillow. But I dare say I deceive myself.
At all events, I shall never know."

"You have a musical voice. Excuse me; I have heard you sing."

"With the children?" she answered, slightly colouring. "O yes. I sing
with the dear children, if it can be called singing."

Barbox Brothers glanced at the two small forms in the room, and hazarded
the speculation that she was fond of children, and that she was learned
in new systems of teaching them? "Very fond of them," she said, shaking
her head again; "but I know nothing of teaching, beyond the interest I
have in it, and the pleasure it gives me when they learn. Perhaps your
overhearing my little scholars sing some of their lessons, has led you so
far astray as to think me a grand teacher? Ah! I thought so! No, I have
only read and been told about that system. It seemed so pretty and
pleasant, and to treat them so like the merry Robins they are, that I
took up with it in my little way. You don't need to be told what a very
little way mine is, sir," she added, with a glance at the small forms and
round the room.

All this time her hands were busy at her lace-pillow. As they still
continued so, and as