’Thornton! is that you?  Come in for a minute or two; I want to speak to you.’  So Mr. Thornton went into the study, and Dixon had to retreat into the kitchen, and reinstate herself in her own esteem by a prodigious story of Sir John Beresford’s coach and six, when he was high sheriff.

’I don’t know what I wanted to say to you after all.  Only it’s dull enough to sit in a room where everything speaks to you of a dead friend.  Yet Margaret and her aunt must have the drawing-room to themselves!’

‘Is Mrs.—­is her aunt come?’ asked Mr. Thornton.

’Come?  Yes! maid and all.  One would have thought she might have come by herself at such a time!  And now I shall have to turn out and find my way to the Clarendon.’

’You must not go to the Clarendon.  We have five or six empty bed-rooms at home.’

‘Well aired?’

‘I think you may trust my mother for that.’

’Then I’ll only run up-stairs and wish that wan girl good-night, and make my bow to her aunt, and go off with you straight.’

Mr. Bell was some time up-stairs.  Mr. Thornton began to think it long, for he was full of business, and had hardly been able to spare the time for running up to Crampton, and enquiring how Miss Hale was.

When they had set out upon their walk, Mr. Bell said: 

’I was kept by those women in the drawing-room.  Mrs. Shaw is anxious to get home—­on account of her daughter, she says—­and wants Margaret to go off with her at once.  Now she is no more fit for travelling than I am for flying.  Besides, she says, and very justly, that she has friends she must see—­that she must wish good-bye to several people; and then her aunt worried her about old claims, and was she forgetful of old friends?  And she said, with a great burst of crying, she should be glad enough to go from a place where she had suffered so much.  Now I must return to Oxford to-morrow, and I don’t know on which side of the scale to throw in my voice.’

He paused, as if asking a question; but he received no answer from his companion, the echo of whose thoughts kept repeating—­

‘Where she had suffered so much.’  Alas! and that was the way in which this eighteen months in Milton—­to him so unspeakably precious, down to its very bitterness, which was worth all the rest of life’s sweetness—­would be remembered.  Neither loss of father, nor loss of mother, dear as she was to Mr. Thornton, could have poisoned the remembrance of the weeks, the days, the hours, when a walk of two miles, every step of which was pleasant, as it brought him nearer and nearer to her, took him to her sweet presence—­every step of which was rich, as each recurring moment that bore him away from her made him recall some fresh grace in her demeanour, or pleasant pungency in her character.  Yes! whatever had happened to him, external to his relation to her, he could never have spoken of that time, when he could have seen her every day—­when he had her within his grasp, as it were—­as a time of suffering.  It had been a royal time of luxury to him, with all its stings and contumelies, compared to the poverty that crept round and clipped the anticipation of the future down to sordid fact, and life without an atmosphere of either hope or fear.