ow well you are doing
here.'

'After all, she got me here,' said the boy, with a struggle.

'Perceiving the necessity of it,' acquiesced the schoolmaster, 'and
making up her mind fully to the separation. Yes.'

The boy, with a return of that former reluctance or struggle or whatever
it was, seemed to debate with himself. At length he said, raising his
eyes to the master's face:

'I wish you'd come with me and see her, Mr Headstone, though she is not
settled. I wish you'd come with me, and take her in the rough, and judge
her for yourself.'

'You are sure you would not like,' asked the schoolmaster, 'to prepare
her?'

'My sister Lizzie,' said the boy, proudly, 'wants no preparing, Mr
Headstone. What she is, she is, and shows herself to be. There's no
pretending about my sister.'

His confidence in her, sat more easily upon him than the indecision with
which he had twice contended. It was his better nature to be true to
her, if it were his worse nature to be wholly selfish. And as yet the
better nature had the stronger hold.

'Well, I can spare the evening,' said the schoolmaster. 'I am ready to
walk with you.'

'Thank you, Mr Headstone. And I am ready to go.'

Bradley Headstone, in his decent black coat and waistcoat, and decent
white shirt, and decent formal black tie, and decent pantaloons of
pepper and salt, with his decent silver watch in his pocket and its
decent hair-guard round his neck, looked a thoroughly decent young man
of six-and-twenty. He was never seen in any other dress, and yet there
was a certain stiffness in his manner of wearing this, as if there were
a want of adaptation between him and it, recalling some mechanics in
their holiday clothes. He had acquired mechanically a great store of
teacher's knowledge. He could do mental arithmetic mechanically, sing
at sight mechanically, blow various wind instruments mechanically, even
play the great church organ mechanically. From his early childhood up,
his mind had been a place of mechanical stowage. The arrangement of
his wholesale warehouse, so that it might be always ready to meet the
demands of retail dealers history here, geography there, astronomy to
the right, political economy to the left--natural history, the physical
sciences, figures, music, the lower mathematics, and what not, all in
their several places--this care had imparted to his countenance a look
of care; while the habit of questioning and being questioned had given
him a sus