‘I am sorry to hear you say so, Ma—­’

‘I am sorry to say so, my dear,’ interposed the old lady, knitting on firmly, ‘but I can’t help it.’

‘—­For,’ pursued the Minor Canon, ’it is undeniable that Mr. Neville is exceedingly industrious and attentive, and that he improves apace, and that he has—­I hope I may say—­an attachment to me.’

‘There is no merit in the last article, my dear,’ said the old lady, quickly; ’and if he says there is, I think the worse of him for the boast.’

‘But, my dear Ma, he never said there was.’

‘Perhaps not,’ returned the old lady; ’still, I don’t see that it greatly signifies.’

There was no impatience in the pleasant look with which Mr. Crisparkle contemplated the pretty old piece of china as it knitted; but there was, certainly, a humorous sense of its not being a piece of china to argue with very closely.

’Besides, Sept, ask yourself what he would be without his sister.  You know what an influence she has over him; you know what a capacity she has; you know that whatever he reads with you, he reads with her.  Give her her fair share of your praise, and how much do you leave for him?’

At these words Mr. Crisparkle fell into a little reverie, in which he thought of several things.  He thought of the times he had seen the brother and sister together in deep converse over one of his own old college books; now, in the rimy mornings, when he made those sharpening pilgrimages to Cloisterham Weir; now, in the sombre evenings, when he faced the wind at sunset, having climbed his favourite outlook, a beetling fragment of monastery ruin; and the two studious figures passed below him along the margin of the river, in which the town fires and lights already shone, making the landscape bleaker.  He thought how the consciousness had stolen upon him that in teaching one, he was teaching two; and how he had almost insensibly adapted his explanations to both minds—­that with which his own was daily in contact, and that which he only approached through it.  He thought of the gossip that had reached him from the Nuns’ House, to the effect that Helena, whom he had mistrusted as so proud and fierce, submitted herself to the fairy-bride (as he called her), and learnt from her what she knew.  He thought of the picturesque alliance between those two, externally so very different.  He thought—­perhaps most of all—­could it be that these things were yet but so many weeks old, and had become an integral part of his life?

As, whenever the Reverend Septimus fell a-musing, his good mother took it to be an infallible sign that he ‘wanted support,’ the blooming old lady made all haste to the dining-room closet, to produce from it the support embodied in a glass of Constantia and a home-made biscuit.  It was a most wonderful closet, worthy of Cloisterham and of Minor Canon Corner.  Above it, a portrait of Handel in a flowing wig beamed down at the spectator,