I went on with my hair now, quite comfortably.  I sobbed a little still, but that was because I had been crying, not because I was crying then.

“And so Esther, my dear, you are happy for life.  Happy with your best friends, happy in your old home, happy in the power of doing a great deal of good, and happy in the undeserved love of the best of men.”

I thought, all at once, if my guardian had married some one else, how should I have felt, and what should I have done!  That would have been a change indeed.  It presented my life in such a new and blank form that I rang my housekeeping keys and gave them a kiss before I laid them down in their basket again.

Then I went on to think, as I dressed my hair before the glass, how often had I considered within myself that the deep traces of my illness and the circumstances of my birth were only new reasons why I should be busy, busy, busy—­useful, amiable, serviceable, in all honest, unpretending ways.  This was a good time, to be sure, to sit down morbidly and cry!  As to its seeming at all strange to me at first (if that were any excuse for crying, which it was not) that I was one day to be the mistress of Bleak House, why should it seem strange?  Other people had thought of such things, if I had not.  “Don’t you remember, my plain dear,” I asked myself, looking at the glass, “what Mrs. Woodcourt said before those scars were there about your marrying—­”

Perhaps the name brought them to my remembrance.  The dried remains of the flowers.  It would be better not to keep them now.  They had only been preserved in memory of something wholly past and gone, but it would be better not to keep them now.

They were in a book, and it happened to be in the next room—­our sitting-room, dividing Ada’s chamber from mine.  I took a candle and went softly in to fetch it from its shelf.  After I had it in my hand, I saw my beautiful darling, through the open door, lying asleep, and I stole in to kiss her.

It was weak in me, I know, and I could have no reason for crying; but I dropped a tear upon her dear face, and another, and another.  Weaker than that, I took the withered flowers out and put them for a moment to her lips.  I thought about her love for Richard, though, indeed, the flowers had nothing to do with that.  Then I took them into my own room and burned them at the candle, and they were dust in an instant.

On entering the breakfast-room next morning, I found my guardian just as usual, quite as frank, as open, and free.  There being not the least constraint in his manner, there was none (or I think there was none) in mine.  I was with him several times in the course of the morning, in and out, when there was no one there, and I thought it not unlikely that he might speak to me about the letter, but he did not say a word.

So, on the next morning, and the next, and for at least a week, over which time Mr. Skimpole prolonged his stay.  I expected, every day, that my guardian might speak to me about the letter, but he never did.