‘I have been wanting to come for several weeks.’

’That’s right.  Now you must see my house—­lonely, isn’t it, for a single person?  People said it was odd for a young woman like me to keep on a house; but what did I care?  If you knew the pleasure of locking up your own door, with the sensation that you reigned supreme inside it, you would say it was worth the risk of being called odd.  Mr. Springrove attends to my gardening, the dog attends to robbers, and whenever there is a snake or toad to kill, Jane does it.’

‘How nice!  It is better than living in a town.’

‘Far better.  A town makes a cynic of me.’

The remark recalled, somewhat startlingly, to Cytherea’s mind, that Edward had used those very words to herself one evening at Budmouth.

Miss Hinton opened an interior door and led her visitor into a small drawing-room commanding a view of the country for miles.

The missionary business was soon settled; but the chat continued.

‘How lonely it must be here at night!’ said Cytherea.  ’Aren’t you afraid?’

’At first I was, slightly.  But I got used to the solitude.  And you know a sort of commonsense will creep even into timidity.  I say to myself sometimes at night, “If I were anybody but a harmless woman, not worth the trouble of a worm’s ghost to appear to me, I should think that every sound I hear was a spirit.”  But you must see all over my house.’

Cytherea was highly interested in seeing.

’I say you must do this, and you must do that, as if you were a child,’ remarked Adelaide.  ’A privileged friend of mine tells me this use of the imperative comes of being so constantly in nobody’s society but my own.’

‘Ah, yes.  I suppose she is right.’

Cytherea called the friend ‘she’ by a rule of ladylike practice; for a woman’s ‘friend’ is delicately assumed by another friend to be of their own sex in the absence of knowledge to the contrary; just as cats are called she’s until they prove themselves he’s.

Miss Hinton laughed mysteriously.

‘I get a humorous reproof for it now and then, I assure you,’ she continued.

’"Humorous reproof:”  that’s not from a woman:  who can reprove humorously but a man?’ was the groove of Cytherea’s thought at the remark.  ‘Your brother reproves you, I expect,’ said that innocent young lady.

‘No,’ said Miss Hinton, with a candid air. ’’Tis only a professional man I am acquainted with.’  She looked out of the window.

Women are persistently imitative.  No sooner did a thought flash through Cytherea’s mind that the man was a lover than she became a Miss Aldclyffe in a mild form.

‘I imagine he’s a lover,’ she said.

Miss Hinton smiled a smile of experience in that line.

Few women, if taxed with having an admirer, are so free from vanity as to deny the impeachment, even if it is utterly untrue.  When it does happen to be true, they look pityingly away from the person who is so benighted as to have got no further than suspecting it.