“You’ll be taking to painting your cheeks next, now you’ve once thought of dyeing your hair.”  So Miss Benson plaited her grey hair in silence and quietness, Leonard holding one end of it while she wove it, and admiring the colour and texture all the time, with a sort of implied dissatisfaction at the auburn colour of his own curls, which was only half-comforted away by Miss Benson’s information, that, if he lived long enough, his hair would be like hers.

Mr. Benson, who had looked old and frail while he was yet but young, was now stationary as to the date of his appearance.  But there was something more of nervous restlessness in his voice and ways than formerly; that was the only change five years had brought to him.  And as for Sally, she chose to forget age and the passage of years altogether, and had as much work in her, to use her own expression, as she had at sixteen; nor was her appearance very explicit as to the flight of time.  Fifty, sixty, or seventy, she might be—­not more than the last, not less than the first—­though her usual answer to any circuitous inquiry as to her age was now (what it had been for many years past), “I’m feared I shall never see thirty again.”

Then as to the house.  It was not one where the sitting-rooms are refurnished every two or three years; not now, even (since Ruth came to share their living) a place where, as an article grew shabby or worn, a new one was purchased.  The furniture looked poor, and the carpets almost threadbare; but there was such a dainty spirit of cleanliness abroad, such exquisite neatness of repair, and altogether so bright and cheerful a look about the rooms—­everything so above-board—­no shifts to conceal poverty under flimsy ornament—­that many a splendid drawing-room would give less pleasure to those who could see evidences of character in inanimate things.  But whatever poverty there might be in the house, there was full luxuriance in the little square wall-encircled garden, on two sides of which the parlour and kitchen looked.  The laburnum-tree, which when Ruth came was like a twig stuck into the ground, was now a golden glory in spring, and a pleasant shade in summer.  The wild hop, that Mr. Benson had brought home from one of his country rambles, and planted by the parlour-window, while Leonard was yet a baby in his mother’s arms, was now a garland over the casement, hanging down long tendrils, that waved in the breezes, and threw pleasant shadows and traceries, like some old Bacchanalian carving, on the parlour-walls, at “morn or dusky eve.”  The yellow rose had clambered up to the window of Mr. Benson’s bedroom, and its blossom-laden branches were supported by a jargonelle pear-tree rich in autumnal fruit.