Mr. Talbot was a working stone-mason, and on rare occasions when front parlour people caught glimpses of him, he was observed to be sitting in the kitchen in some uncomfortable attitude of unoccupation, “like white-haired Saturn, quiet as a stone.”  It is not recorded that he ever thought on any subject, and it is certain that he seldom spoke.  He would flee from a stranger as from a lion, and, when confronted by such from the wilds of the front parlour, he would bob his old head pathetically, and make no attempt at speech beyond a muffled good-evening.  It disconcerted him to be expected to speak, and his tongue slumbered in his mouth,—­for he was an old weary man, and perhaps very wise.

Old Mrs. Talbot, whose wifehood had long since been submerged in an immeasurable motherhood and the best of cooks, would do the little thinking the house required, take charge of the old man’s earnings, pay the rent and the burial club, and scheme little savings against Jenny’s marriage—­which she kept, not in an old stocking, but in a precious teapot of some old-fashioned ware reputed valuable, and itself carefully wrapped up in a yellow handkerchief of Cashmere.  The old lady had a heart of fun in her, and even her notion of romance, and her withered old apple of a face, with its quaint ringleted hair, had once been bonny and red, you might be sure.  But she was half blind now, and a good deal deaf, and her sweet old mouth was hard to get at when she kissed you, as she had a motherly way of insisting if she liked you.  She, too, was very old, and she, I know, was very wise.

Jenny—­well, there is really not much to describe about Jenny, beyond that she was sweetly little, had a winning old-fashioned air about her, was very good, that is, very kind, and was adored by the school-children, whom she taught first for love and then for dress and pocket-money.  She was but nineteen, and all unminted woman as yet.  No lover had yet come to stamp her features with his masterful superscription.  Was she pretty?  Heroines ought to be either very pretty or very plain.  Well, the beauty that was going to be was as yet only beginning at the eyes.  They were already beautiful.  No, she wasn’t pretty yet, but she wasn’t plain.

Jenny’s face slept as yet.  When the fairy prince came and kissed it, there was no telling to what beauty it would awake.  The fairy prince!  That was going to be our friend Theophil, of course.  Well, of course, though it’s a little early on to admit it.  However, I am unequal to the task of concealing from the hawk-eyed reader through a succession of chapters that Jenny and Theophil were to be each other’s “fates.”  Of course, he hadn’t been there a month before Jenny’s face was beginning to wear that superscription of his passionate intelligence, to grow merry from his laughter, and still sweeter by his kisses.

Of course, Theophil and Jenny fell in love.  Do you think it was merely to save New Zion and to bring the Renaissance to Coalchester that Theophilus Londonderry was sent to live in Zion Place—­or for any other purpose less important than to love Jenny?  Yes, we may as well take that for granted as we begin the next chapter.