“Let me alone,” said she, one day when she came in to sit awhile with me.  “That man is a good man—­a sensible man—­and I have no doubt he is a good lawyer; but he can’t fathom women yet.  I make no doubt he’ll go back to Warwick, and never give credit again to those people who made him think me half-cracked to begin with.  O, my dear, he did!  He showed it twenty times worse than my poor dear master ever did.  It was a form to be gone through to please my lady, and, for her sake, he would hear my statements and see my books.  It was keeping a woman out of harm’s way, at any rate, to let her fancy herself useful.  I read the man.  And, I am thankful to say, he cannot read me.  At least, only one side of me.  When I see an end to be gained, I can behave myself accordingly.  Here was a man who thought that a woman in a black silk gown was a respectable, orderly kind of person; and I was a woman in a black silk gown.  He believed that a woman could not write straight lines, and required a man to tell her that two and two made four.  I was not above ruling my books, and had Cocker a little more at my fingers’ ends than he had.  But my greatest triumph has been holding my tongue.  He would have thought nothing of my books, or my sums, or my black silk gown, if I had spoken unasked.  So I have buried more sense in my bosom these ten days than ever I have uttered in the whole course of my life before.  I have been so curt, so abrupt, so abominably dull, that I’ll answer for it he thinks me worthy to be a man.  But I must go back to him, my dear, so good-bye to conversation and you.”

But though Mr. Smithson might be satisfied with Miss Galindo, I am afraid she was the only part of the affair with which he was content.  Everything else went wrong.  I could not say who told me so—­but the conviction of this seemed to pervade the house.  I never knew how much we had all looked up to the silent, gruff Mr. Horner for decisions, until he was gone.  My lady herself was a pretty good woman of business, as women of business go.  Her father, seeing that she would be the heiress of the Hanbury property, had given her a training which was thought unusual in those days, and she liked to feel herself queen regnant, and to have to decide in all cases between herself and her tenantry.  But, perhaps, Mr. Horner would have done it more wisely; not but what she always attended to him at last.  She would begin by saying, pretty clearly and promptly, what she would have done, and what she would not have done.  If Mr. Horner approved of it, he bowed, and set about obeying her directly; if he disapproved of it, he bowed, and lingered so long before he obeyed her, that she forced his opinion out of him with her “Well, Mr. Horner! and what have you to say against it?” For she always understood his silence as well as if he had spoken.  But the estate was pressed for ready money, and Mr. Horner had grown gloomy and languid since the death of his wife, and even his own personal affairs were not in the order in which they had been a year or two before, for his old clerk had gradually become superannuated, or, at any rate, unable by the superfluity of his own energy and wit to supply the spirit that was wanting in Mr. Horner.