as it were, a third person present, even when I and my mother are alone.  She can’t be frank with me quite; who is always thinking of the next world, and of her guardian angel, perhaps that’s in company.  Oh, Harry, I’m jealous of that guardian angel!” here broke out Mistress Beatrix.  “It’s horrid, I know; but my mother’s life is all for heaven, and mine—­all for earth.  We can never be friends quite; and then, she cares more for Frank’s little finger than she does for me—­I know she does:  and she loves you, sir, a great deal too much; and I hate you for it.  I would have had her all to myself; but she wouldn’t.  In my childhood, it was my father she loved—­(oh, how could she?  I remember him kind and handsome, but so stupid, and not being able to speak after drinking wine).  And then it was Frank; and now, it is heaven and the clergyman.  How I would have loved her!  From a child I used to be in a rage that she loved anybody but me; but she loved you all better—­all, I know she did.  And now, she talks of the blessed consolation of religion.  Dear soul! she thinks she is happier for believing, as she must, that we are all of us wicked and miserable sinners; and this world is only a pied-a-terre for the good, where they stay for a night, as we do, coming from Walcote, at that great, dreary, uncomfortable Hounslow Inn, in those horrid beds—­oh, do you remember those horrid beds?—­and the chariot comes and fetches them to heaven the next morning.”

“Hush, Beatrix,” says Mr. Esmond.

“Hush, indeed.  You are a hypocrite, too, Henry, with your grave airs and your glum face.  We are all hypocrites.  O dear me!  We are all alone, alone, alone,” says poor Beatrix, her fair breast heaving with a sigh.

“It was I that writ every line of that paper, my dear,” says Mr. Esmond.  “You are not so worldly as you think yourself, Beatrix, and better than we believe you.  The good we have in us we doubt of; and the happiness that’s to our hand we throw away.  You bend your ambition on a great marriage and establishment—­and why?  You’ll tire of them when you win them; and be no happier with a coronet on your coach—­”

“Than riding pillion with Lubin to market,” says Beatrix.  “Thank you, Lubin!”

“I’m a dismal shepherd, to be sure,” answers Esmond, with a blush; “and require a nymph that can tuck my bed-clothes up, and make me water-gruel.  Well, Tom Lockwood can do that.  He took me out of the fire upon his shoulders, and nursed me through my illness as love will scarce ever do.  Only good wages, and a hope of my clothes, and the contents of my portmanteau.  How long was it that Jacob served an apprenticeship for Rachel?”

“For mamma?” says Beatrix.  “It is mamma your honor wants, and that I should have the happiness of calling you papa?”

Esmond blushed again.  “I spoke of a Rachel that a shepherd courted five thousand years ago; when shepherds were longer lived than now.  And my meaning was, that since I saw you first after our separation—­a child you were then . . .”