There was an awkward constraint upon him, nevertheless, as he touched her hand, and took a chair at the side of her couch.

“I see now,” he began, not at all fluently, “how you occupy your hand.  Only seeing you from the path outside, I thought you were playing upon something.”

She was engaged in very nimbly and dexterously making lace.  A lace-pillow lay upon her breast; and the quick movements and changes of her hands upon it, as she worked, had given them the action he had misinterpreted.

“That is curious,” she answered with a bright smile.  “For I often fancy, myself, that I play tunes while I am at work.”

“Have you any musical knowledge?”

She shook her head.

“I think I could pick out tunes, if I had any instrument, which could be made as handy to me as my lace-pillow.  But I dare say I deceive myself.  At all events, I shall never know.”

“You have a musical voice.  Excuse me; I have heard you sing.”

“With the children?” she answered, slightly colouring.  “Oh yes.  I sing with the dear children, if it can be called singing.”

Barbox Brothers glanced at the two small forms in the room, and hazarded the speculation that she was fond of children, and that she was learned in new systems of teaching them?

“Very fond of them,” she said, shaking her head again; “but I know nothing of teaching, beyond the interest I have in it, and the pleasure it gives me when they learn.  Perhaps your overhearing my little scholars sing some of their lessons has led you so far astray as to think me a grand teacher?  Ah!  I thought so!  No, I have only read and been told about that system.  It seemed so pretty and pleasant, and to treat them so like the merry Robins they are, that I took up with it in my little way.  You don’t need to be told what a very little way mine is, sir,” she added with a glance at the small forms and round the room.

All this time her hands were busy at her lace-pillow.  As they still continued so, and as there was a kind of substitute for conversation in the click and play of its pegs, Barbox Brothers took the opportunity of observing her.  He guessed her to be thirty.  The charm of her transparent face and large bright brown eyes was, not that they were passively resigned, but that they were actively and thoroughly cheerful.  Even her busy hands, which of their own thinness alone might have besought compassion, plied their task with a gay courage that made mere compassion an unjustifiable assumption of superiority, and an impertinence.

He saw her eyes in the act of rising towards his, and he directed his towards the prospect, saying:  “Beautiful, indeed!”

“Most beautiful, sir.  I have sometimes had a fancy that I would like to sit up, for once, only to try how it looks to an erect head.  But what a foolish fancy that would be to encourage!  It cannot look more lovely to any one than it does to me.”