It was nearly midnight before we found an opportunity of going to bed, and even then we left Mrs. Jellyby among her papers drinking coffee and Miss Jellyby biting the feather of her pen.

“What a strange house!” said Ada when we got upstairs.  “How curious of my cousin Jarndyce to send us here!”

“My love,” said I, “it quite confuses me.  I want to understand it, and I can’t understand it at all.”

“What?” asked Ada with her pretty smile.

“All this, my dear,” said I.  “It must be very good of Mrs. Jellyby to take such pains about a scheme for the benefit of natives—­and yet—­Peepy and the housekeeping!”

Ada laughed and put her arm about my neck as I stood looking at the fire, and told me I was a quiet, dear, good creature and had won her heart.  “You are so thoughtful, Esther,” she said, “and yet so cheerful!  And you do so much, so unpretendingly!  You would make a home out of even this house.”

My simple darling!  She was quite unconscious that she only praised herself and that it was in the goodness of her own heart that she made so much of me!

“May I ask you a question?” said I when we had sat before the fire a little while.

“Five hundred,” said Ada.

“Your cousin, Mr. Jarndyce.  I owe so much to him.  Would you mind describing him to me?”

Shaking her golden hair, Ada turned her eyes upon me with such laughing wonder that I was full of wonder too, partly at her beauty, partly at her surprise.

“Esther!” she cried.

“My dear!”

“You want a description of my cousin Jarndyce?”

“My dear, I never saw him.”

“And I never saw him!” returned Ada.

Well, to be sure!

No, she had never seen him.  Young as she was when her mama died, she remembered how the tears would come into her eyes when she spoke of him and of the noble generosity of his character, which she had said was to be trusted above all earthly things; and Ada trusted it.  Her cousin Jarndyce had written to her a few months ago—­“a plain, honest letter,” Ada said—­proposing the arrangement we were now to enter on and telling her that “in time it might heal some of the wounds made by the miserable Chancery suit.”  She had replied, gratefully accepting his proposal.  Richard had received a similar letter and had made a similar response.  He had seen Mr. Jarndyce once, but only once, five years ago, at Winchester school.  He had told Ada, when they were leaning on the screen before the fire where I found them, that he recollected him as “a bluff, rosy fellow.”  This was the utmost description Ada could give me.

It set me thinking so that when Ada was asleep, I still remained before the fire, wondering and wondering about Bleak House, and wondering and wondering that yesterday morning should seem so long ago.  I don’t know where my thoughts had wandered when they were recalled by a tap at the door.