“He’ll be worn out!” said Mrs. Nettley.

“No he won’t,” said Clam.  “He ain’t one o’ them that have to try hard to make things go —­ works like oiled ’chinery —­ powerful too, I can tell you.”

“What’s going to be done?” said Mrs. Nettley meditatively.

“Can’t say,” said Clam.  “I wish my wishes was goin’ to be done —­ but I s’pose they ain’t.  People’s ain’t mostly, in this world.”  She went off with her dish of tea and what not, to her mistress up-stairs.  But Elizabeth this time would endure neither her presence nor her proposal.  Clam was obliged to go down again leaving her mistress as she had found her.  Alone with herself.

Then, when the sun was long past the meridian, Elizabeth heard upon the stair another step, of the only friend, as it seemed to her, that she had.  She raised her head and listened to it.  The step went past her door, and into the other room, and she sat waiting.  “How little he knows,” she thought, “how much of a friend he is! how little he guesses it.  How far he is from thinking that when he shall have bid me good bye —­ somewhere —­ he will have taken away all of help and comfort I have. —­”

But clear and well defined as this thought was in her mind at the moment, it did not prevent her meeting her benefactor with as much outward calmness as if it had not been there.  Yet the quiet meeting of hands had much that was hard to bear.  Elizabeth did not dare let her thoughts take hold of it.

“Have you had what you wanted?” he said, in the way in which one asks a question of no moment when important ones are behind.

“I have had all I could have,” Elizabeth answered.

There was a pause; and then he asked,

“What are your plans, Miss Elizabeth?”

“I haven’t formed any. —­ I couldn’t not, yet.”

“Do you wish to stay in the city, or to go out of it?”

“Oh to go out of it!” said Elizabeth, —­ “if I could —­ if I knew where.”

“Where is your cousin?”

“She was at Vantassel; but she left it for some friend’s house in the country, I believe.  I don’t want to be where she is.”

Elizabeth’s tears came again.

“It seems very strange —­” she said presently, trying to put a stop to them, but her words stopped.

“What?” said Winthrop.

“It seems very strange, —­ but I hardly know where to go.  I have no friends near —­ no near friends, in any sense; there are some, hundreds of miles off, in distance, and further than that in kind regard.  I know plenty of people, but I have no friends. —­ I would go up to Wut-a-qut-o, if there was anybody there,” she added after a minute or two.

“Shahweetah has passed into other hands,” said Winthrop.

“I know it,” said Elizabeth; —­ “it passed into mine.”

Winthrop started a little, and then after another moment’s pause said quietly,

“Are you serious in wishing to go there now?”