ow, as it were, the little
thing reappeared vividly to me in just the way I had seen her so long
ago. My sense of her forlornness, of her most hapless orphanhood, was
intensified by the implacable hate with which Mrs. Hasketh had then
spoken of her father, in telling us that the child was henceforth to
bear her husband's name, and had resentfully scorned the merit Tedham
tried to make of giving her up to them. "And if I can help it," she had
ended, with a fierceness I had never forgotten, "she shall not hear him
mentioned again, or see him as long as I live."

My wife and I now involuntarily dropped our voices, or rather they sank
into our throats, as we sat waiting in the dim parlor, after the maid
took our cards to Mr. and Mrs. Hasketh. We tried to make talk, but we
could not, and we were funereally quiet, when Hasketh came pottering and
peering in, and shook hands with both of us. He threw open half a blind
at one of the windows, and employed himself in trying to put up the
shade, to gain time, as I thought, before he should be obliged to tell
us that his wife could not see us. Then he came to me, and asked, "Won't
you let me take your hat?" as such people do, in expression of a vague
hospitality; and I let him take it, and put it mouth down on the marble
centre-table, beside the large, gilt-edged, black-bound family Bible. He
drew a chair near me, in a row with my wife and myself, and said, "It is
quite a number of years since we met, Mrs. March," and he looked across
me at her.

"Yes, I am almost afraid to think how many," she answered.

"Family well?"

"Yes, our children are both very well, Mr. Hasketh. You seem to be
looking very well, too."

"Thank you, I have nothing to complain of. I am not so young as I was.
But that is about all."

"I hope Mrs. Hasketh is well?"

"Yes, thank you, she is quite well, for her. She is never very strong.
She will be down in a moment."

"Oh, I shall be so glad to see her."

The conversation, which might be said to have flagged from the
beginning, stopped altogether at this point, and though I was prompted
by several looks from my wife to urge it forward, I could think of
nothing to do so with, and we sat without speaking till we heard the
stir of skirts on the stairs in the hall outside, and then my wife said,
"Ah, that is Mrs. Hasketh."

I should have known it was Mrs. Hasketh without this sort of
anticipation, I think, even if I had never seen her before, she was so