‘Yes, indeed, sir,’ answered Rosa.

‘For which,’ said Mr. Grewgious, with a bend of his head towards the corner window, ’our warmest acknowledgments are due, and I am sure are rendered, to the maternal kindness and the constant care and consideration of the lady whom I have now the honour to see before me.’

This point, again, made but a lame departure from Mr. Grewgious, and never got to its destination; for, Miss Twinkleton, feeling that the courtesies required her to be by this time quite outside the conversation, was biting the end of her pen, and looking upward, as waiting for the descent of an idea from any member of the Celestial Nine who might have one to spare.

Mr. Grewgious smoothed his smooth head again, and then made another reference to his pocket-book; lining out ‘well and happy,’ as disposed of.

’"Pounds, shillings, and pence,” is my next note.  A dry subject for a young lady, but an important subject too.  Life is pounds, shillings, and pence.  Death is—­’ A sudden recollection of the death of her two parents seemed to stop him, and he said in a softer tone, and evidently inserting the negative as an after-thought:  ‘Death is not pounds, shillings, and pence.’

His voice was as hard and dry as himself, and Fancy might have ground it straight, like himself, into high-dried snuff.  And yet, through the very limited means of expression that he possessed, he seemed to express kindness.  If Nature had but finished him off, kindness might have been recognisable in his face at this moment.  But if the notches in his forehead wouldn’t fuse together, and if his face would work and couldn’t play, what could he do, poor man!

’"Pounds, shillings, and pence.”  You find your allowance always sufficient for your wants, my dear?’

Rosa wanted for nothing, and therefore it was ample.

‘And you are not in debt?’

Rosa laughed at the idea of being in debt.  It seemed, to her inexperience, a comical vagary of the imagination.  Mr. Grewgious stretched his near sight to be sure that this was her view of the case.  ‘Ah!’ he said, as comment, with a furtive glance towards Miss Twinkleton, and lining out pounds, shillings, and pence:  ’I spoke of having got among the angels!  So I did!’

Rosa felt what his next memorandum would prove to be, and was blushing and folding a crease in her dress with one embarrassed hand, long before he found it.

‘"Marriage.”  Hem!’ Mr. Grewgious carried his smoothing hand down over his eyes and nose, and even chin, before drawing his chair a little nearer, and speaking a little more confidentially:  ’I now touch, my dear, upon the point that is the direct cause of my troubling you with the present visit.  Othenwise, being a particularly Angular man, I should not have intruded here.  I am the last man to intrude into a sphere for which I am so entirely unfitted.  I feel, on these premises, as if I was a bear—­with the cramp—­in a youthful Cotillon.’