“How d’ye do, Mrs Roper? how d’ye do, Amelia?—­how d’ye do, Miss Spruce?” and he shook hands with them all.

“Oh, laws,” said Mrs Roper, “you have given me such a start!”

“Dear me, Mr Eames; only think of your coming back in that way,” said Amelia.

“Well, what way should I come back?  You didn’t hear me knock at the door, that’s all.  So Miss Spruce is really going to leave you?”

“Isn’t it dreadful, Mr Eames?  Nineteen years we’ve been together;—­taking both houses together, Miss Spruce, we have, indeed.”  Miss Spruce, at this point, struggled very hard to convince John Eames that the period in question had in truth extended over only eighteen years, but Mrs Roper was authoritative, and would not permit it.  “It’s nineteen years if it’s a day.  No one ought to know dates if I don’t, and there isn’t one in the world understands her ways unless it’s me.  Haven’t I been up to your bedroom every night, and with my own hand given you—­” But she stopped herself, and was too good a woman to declare before a young man what had been the nature of her nightly ministrations to her guest.

“I don’t think you’ll be so comfortable anywhere else, Miss Spruce,” said Eames.

“Comfortable! of course she won’t,” said Amelia.  “But if I was mother I wouldn’t have any more words about it.”

“It isn’t the money I’m thinking of, but the feeling of it,” said Mrs Roper.  “The house will be so lonely like.  I shan’t know myself; that I shan’t.  And now that things are all settled so pleasantly, and that the Lupexes must go on Tuesday—­I’ll tell you what, Sally; I’ll pay for the cab myself, and I’ll start off to Dulwich by the omnibus to-morrow, and settle it all out of my own pocket.  I will indeed.  Come; there’s the cab.  Let me go down, and send him away.”

“I’ll do that,” said Eames.  “It’s only sixpence, off the stand,” Mrs Roper called to him as he left the room.  But the cabman got a shilling, and John, as he returned, found Jemima in the act of carrying Miss Spruce’s boxes back to her room.  “So much the better for poor Caudle,” said he to himself.  “As he has gone into the trade it’s well that he should have somebody that will pay him.”

Mrs Roper followed Miss Spruce up the stairs and Johnny was left with Amelia.  “He’s written to you, I know,” said she, with her face turned a little away from him.  She was certainly very handsome, but there was a hard, cross, almost sullen look about her, which robbed her countenance of all its pleasantness.  And yet she had no intention of being sullen with him.

“Yes,” said John.  “He has told me how it’s all going to be.”

“Well?” she said.

“Well?” said he.

“Is that all you’ve got to say?”

“I’ll congratulate you, if you’ll let me.”

“Psha;—­congratulations!  I hate such humbug.  If you’ve no feelings about it, I’m sure that I’ve none.  Indeed I don’t know what’s the good of feelings.  They never did me any good.  Are you engaged to marry L. D.?”