“He is not, my lord,” said Mr. Kenge.

A pause.

“Young Mr. Richard Carstone is present?” said the Lord Chancellor, glancing towards him.

Richard bowed and stepped forward.

“Hum!” said the Lord Chancellor, turning over more leaves.

“Mr. Jarndyce of Bleak House, my lord,” Mr. Kenge observed in a low voice, “if I may venture to remind your lordship, provides a suitable companion for—­”

“For Mr. Richard Carstone?” I thought (but I am not quite sure) I heard his lordship say in an equally low voice and with a smile.

“For Miss Ada Clare.  This is the young lady.  Miss Summerson.”

His lordship gave me an indulgent look and acknowledged my curtsy very graciously.

“Miss Summerson is not related to any party in the cause, I think?”

“No, my lord.”

Mr. Kenge leant over before it was quite said and whispered.  His lordship, with his eyes upon his papers, listened, nodded twice or thrice, turned over more leaves, and did not look towards me again until we were going away.

Mr. Kenge now retired, and Richard with him, to where I was, near the door, leaving my pet (it is so natural to me that again I can’t help it!) sitting near the Lord Chancellor, with whom his lordship spoke a little part, asking her, as she told me afterwards, whether she had well reflected on the proposed arrangement, and if she thought she would be happy under the roof of Mr. Jarndyce of Bleak House, and why she thought so?  Presently he rose courteously and released her, and then he spoke for a minute or two with Richard Carstone, not seated, but standing, and altogether with more ease and less ceremony, as if he still knew, though he was Lord Chancellor, how to go straight to the candour of a boy.

“Very well!” said his lordship aloud.  “I shall make the order.  Mr. Jarndyce of Bleak House has chosen, so far as I may judge,” and this was when he looked at me, “a very good companion for the young lady, and the arrangement altogether seems the best of which the circumstances admit.”

He dismissed us pleasantly, and we all went out, very much obliged to him for being so affable and polite, by which he had certainly lost no dignity but seemed to us to have gained some.

When we got under the colonnade, Mr. Kenge remembered that he must go back for a moment to ask a question and left us in the fog, with the Lord Chancellor’s carriage and servants waiting for him to come out.

“Well!” said Richard Carstone.  “That’s over!  And where do we go next, Miss Summerson?”

“Don’t you know?” I said.

“Not in the least,” said he.

“And don’t you know, my love?” I asked Ada.

“No!” said she.  “Don’t you?”

“Not at all!” said I.

We looked at one another, half laughing at our being like the children in the wood, when a curious little old woman in a squeezed bonnet and carrying a reticule came curtsying and smiling up to us with an air of great ceremony.