Months slipped by; the trees in Burton Crescent had long been all bare; the summer cries of itinerant vegetable dealers and flower sellers had vanished out of the quiet street.—­The three sisters almost missed them, sitting in that one dull parlor from morning till night, in the intense solitude of people who, having neither heart nor money to spend in gayeties, live forlorn in London lodgings, and knowing nobody, have nobody to visit, nobody to visit them.

Except Mr. Ascott, who still called, and occasionally stayed to tea.  The hospitalities, however, were all on their side.  The first entertainment—­to which Selina insisted upon going, and Johanna thought Hilary and Ascott had better go too—­was splendid enough, but they were the only ladies present; and though Mr. Ascott did the honors with great magnificence, putting Miss Selina at the head of his table, where she looked exceedingly well, still the sisters agreed it was better that all further invitations to Russell Square should be declined.  Miss Selina herself said it would be more dignified and decorous.

Other visitors they had none.  Ascott never offered to bring any of his friends; and gradually they saw very little of him.  He was frequently out, especially at meal times, so that his aunts gave up the struggle to make the humble dinners better and more to his liking, and would even have hesitated to take the money which he was understood to pay for his board, had he ever offered it, which he did not.  Yet still whenever he did happen to remain with them a day, or an evening, he was good and affectionate, and always entertained them with descriptions of all he would do as soon as he got into practice.

Meantime they kept house as economically as possible upon the little ready money they had, hoping that more would come in—­that Hilary would get pupils.

But Hilary never did.  To any body who knows London this will not be surprising.—­The wonder was in the Misses Leaf being so simple as to imagine that a young country lady, settling herself in lodgings in an obscure metropolitan street, without friends or introduction, could ever expect such a thing.  No thing but her own daring, and the irrepressible well-spring of hope that was in her healthy youth, could have sustained her in what, ten years after, would have appeared to her, as it certainty was, downright insanity.  But Heaven takes care of the mad, the righteously and unselfishly mad, and Heaven took care of poor Hilary.

The hundred labors she went through—­weariness of body and travail of soul, the risks she ran, the pitfalls she escaped—­what need to record here?  Many have recorded the like, many more have known them, and acknowledged that when such histories are reproduced in books how utterly imagination fades before reality.  Hilary never looked back-upon that time herself without a shuddering wonder how she could have dared all and gone through all.  Possibly she never could, but for the sweet old face, growing older yet sweeter every day, which smiled upon her the minute she opened the door of that dull parlor, and made even No. 15 look like home.