“My dear Esther!” he said.  “My best friend!” And he really was so warm-hearted and earnest that in the first surprise and pleasure of his brotherly greeting I could scarcely find breath to tell him that Ada was well.

“Answering my very thoughts—­always the same dear girl!” said Richard, leading me to a chair and seating himself beside me.

I put my veil up, but not quite.

“Always the same dear girl!” said Richard just as heartily as before.

I put up my veil altogether, and laying my hand on Richard’s sleeve and looking in his face, told him how much I thanked him for his kind welcome and how greatly I rejoiced to see him, the more so because of the determination I had made in my illness, which I now conveyed to him.

“My love,” said Richard, “there is no one with whom I have a greater wish to talk than you, for I want you to understand me.”

“And I want you, Richard,” said I, shaking my head, “to understand some one else.”

“Since you refer so immediately to John Jarndyce,” said Richard, “—­I suppose you mean him?”

“Of course I do.”

“Then I may say at once that I am glad of it, because it is on that subject that I am anxious to be understood.  By you, mind—­you, my dear!  I am not accountable to Mr. Jarndyce or Mr. Anybody.”

I was pained to find him taking this tone, and he observed it.

“Well, well, my dear,” said Richard, “we won’t go into that now.  I want to appear quietly in your country-house here, with you under my arm, and give my charming cousin a surprise.  I suppose your loyalty to John Jarndyce will allow that?”

“My dear Richard,” I returned, “you know you would be heartily welcome at his house—­your home, if you will but consider it so; and you are as heartily welcome here!”

“Spoken like the best of little women!” cried Richard gaily.

I asked him how he liked his profession.

“Oh, I like it well enough!” said Richard.  “It’s all right.  It does as well as anything else, for a time.  I don’t know that I shall care about it when I come to be settled, but I can sell out then and—­however, never mind all that botheration at present.”

So young and handsome, and in all respects so perfectly the opposite of Miss Flite!  And yet, in the clouded, eager, seeking look that passed over him, so dreadfully like her!

“I am in town on leave just now,” said Richard.

“Indeed?”

“Yes.  I have run over to look after my—­my Chancery interests before the long vacation,” said Richard, forcing a careless laugh.  “We are beginning to spin along with that old suit at last, I promise you.”

No wonder that I shook my head!

“As you say, it’s not a pleasant subject.”  Richard spoke with the same shade crossing his face as before.  “Let it go to the four winds for to-night.  Puff!  Gone!  Who do you suppose is with me?”