’I certainly should not be amazed if he did further surprise us all.  Has it never struck you how that noontide turn of Adeline’s corresponds with his walk home from the reading-room?’

Lady Merrifield looked rather startled, but Jane only laughed, and said, ’My dear Jasper, if you only knew Ada as well as I do!  Yes, I have seen far too many of those little affairs to be taken in by them.  Poor Ada!  I know exactly how she looks, but she is only flattered, like a pussy-cat waggling the end of its tail—–­it means nothing, and never comes to anything.  The thing that is likely and hopeful is, that he may adopt those young people as nephews and nieces.’

‘Might it not spoil them?’ said Lady Merrifield.

’Oh!  I did not mean that.  They might work with him still.  However, there is no use in settling about that.  The only thing to be expected of him is the unexpected!’

‘And the thing to be done,’ added her sister, ’is to see how and when that poor girl can be got up to Cliff House.’

To the general surprise, Dr. Dagger wished the transit to take place without loss of time.  A certain look of resigned consternation crossed Kalliope’s face on being informed of her destiny, but she justified Mrs. Halfpenny’s commendation of her as the maist douce and conformable patient in the world, for she had not energy enough even to plead against anything so formidable, and she had not yet been told that Ivinghoe Terrace was her home no longer.

The next day she was wrapped in cloaks and carried downstairs between her brother and Mrs. Halfpenny, laid on a mattress in the Merrifield waggonette, which went up the hill at a foot’s pace, and by the same hands, with her old friend the caretaker’s wife going before, was taken upstairs to a beautiful large room, with a window looking out on vernal sky and sea.  She was too much exhausted on her arrival to know anything but the repose on the fresh comfortable bed, whose whiteness was almost rivalled by her cheek, and Mrs. Halfpenny ordered off Alexis, who was watching her in great anxiety.  However, when he came back after his afternoon’s work, it was to find that she had eaten and slept, and now lay, with her eyes open, in quiet interested admiration of a spacious and pleasant bedroom, such as to be a great novelty to one whose life had been spent in cheap lodging houses.  The rooms had been furnished twenty years before as a surprise intended for the wife who never returned to occupy them, and though there was nothing extraordinary in them, there was much to content the eyes accustomed to something very like squalidness, for had not Kalliope’s lot always been the least desirable chamber in the family quarters?