Unlike the vicar, Doctor Grogan was not financially very dependent on Mrs. Poulteney; to be frank, there was not a death certificate in Lyme he would have less sadly signed than hers. But he contained his bile by reminding her that she slept every afternoon; and on his own strict orders. Thus it was that Sarah achieved a daily demi-liberty.

The next debit item was this: "May not always be present with visitors." Here Mrs. Poulteney found herself in a really intolerable dilemma. She most certainly wanted her charity to be seen, which meant that Sarah had to be seen. But that face had the most harmful effect on company. Its sadness reproached; its very rare interventions in conversation- invariably prompted by some previous question that had to be answered (the more intelligent frequent visitors soon learned to make their polite turns towards the companion-secretary clearly rhetorical in nature and intent)-had a disquietingly decisive character about them, not through any desire on Sarah's part to kill the subject but simply because of the innocent imposition of simplicity or common sense on some matter that thrived on the opposite qualities. To Mrs. Poulteney she seemed in this context only too much like one of the figures on a gibbet she dimly remembered from her youth.

Once again Sarah showed her diplomacy. With certain old-established visitors, she remained; with others she either withdrew in the first few minutes or discreetly left when they were announced and before they were ushered in. This latter reason was why Ernestina had never met her at Marlborough House. It at least allowed Mrs. Poulteney to expatiate on the cross she had to carry, though the cross's withdrawal or absence implied a certain failure in her skill in carrying it, which was most tiresome. Yet Sarah herself could hardly be faulted.

But I have left the worst matter to the end. It was this: "Still shows signs of attachment to her seducer."

Mrs. Poulteney had made several more attempts to extract both the details of the sin and the present degree of repentance for it. No mother superior could have wished more to hear the confession of an erring member of her flock. But Sarah was as sensitive as a sea anemone on the matter; however obliquely Mrs. Poulteney approached the subject, the sinner guessed what was coming; and her answers to direct questions were always the same in content, if not in actual words, as the one she had given at her first interrogation.

Now Mrs. Poulteney seldom went out, and never on foot, and in her barouche only to the houses of her equals, so that she had to rely on other eyes for news of Sarah's activities outside her house. Fortunately for her such a pair of eyes existed; even better, the mind behind those eyes was directed by malice and resentment, and was therefore happy to bring frequent reports to the thwarted mistress. This spy, of course, was none other than Mrs. Fairley. Though she had found no pleasure in reading, it offended her that she had been demoted; and although Miss Sarah was scrupulously polite to her and took care not to seem to be usurping the housekeeper's functions, there was inevitably some conflict. It did not please Mrs. Fairley that she had a little less work, since that meant also a little less influence. Sarah's saving of Millie-and other more discreet interventions-made her popular and respected downstairs; and perhaps Mrs. Fairley's deepest rage was that she could not speak ill of the secretary-companion to her underlings. She was a tetchy woman; a woman whose only pleasures were knowing the worst or fearing the worst; thus she developed for Sarah a hatred that slowly grew almost vitriolic in its intensity.

She was too shrewd a weasel not to hide this from Mrs. Poulteney. Indeed she made a pretense of being very sorry for "poor Miss Woodruff" and her reports were plentifully seasoned with "I fear" and "I am afraid." But she had excellent opportunities to do her spying, for not only was she frequently in the town herself in connection with her duties, but she had also a wide network of relations and acquaintances at her command. To these latter she hinted that Mrs. Poulteney was concerned-of course for the best and most Christian of reasons-to be informed of Miss Woodruff's behavior outside the tall stone walls of the gardens of Marlborough House. The result, Lyme Regis being then as now as riddled with gossip as a drum of Blue Vinny with maggots, was that Sarah's every movement and expression- darkly exaggerated and abundantly glossed-in her free hours was soon known to Mrs. Fairley.

The pattern of her exterior movements-when she was spared the tracts-was very simple; she always went for the same afternoon walk, down steep Pound Street into steep Broad Street and thence to the Cobb Gate, which is a square terrace overlooking the sea and has nothing to do with the Cobb. There she would stand at the wall and look out to sea, but generally not for long-no longer than the careful appraisal a ship's captain gives when he comes out on the bridge-before turning either down Cockmoil or going in the other direction, westwards, along the half-mile path that runs round a gentle bay to the Cobb proper. If she went down Cockmoil she would most often turn into the parish church, and pray for a few minutes (a fact that Mrs. Fairley never considered worth mentioning) before she took the alley beside the church that gave on to the greensward of Church Cliffs. The turf there climbed towards the broken walls of Black Ven. Up this grassland she might be seen walking, with frequent turns towards the sea, to where the path joined the old road to Charmouth, now long eroded into the Ven, whence she would return to Lyme. This walk she would do when the Cobb seemed crowded; but when weather or circumstance made it deserted, she would more often turn that way and end by standing where Charles had first seen her; there, it was supposed, she felt herself nearest to France.

All this, suitably distorted and draped in black, came back to Mrs. Poulteney. But she was then in the first possessive pleasure of her new toy, and as sympathetically disposed as it was in her sour and suspicious old nature to be. She did not, however, hesitate to take the toy to task.

"I am told, Miss Woodruff, that you are always to be seen in the same places when you go out." Sarah looked down before the accusing eyes. "You look to sea." Still Sarah was silent. "I am satisfied that you are in a state of repentance. Indeed I cannot believe that you should be anything else in your present circumstances."

Sarah took her cue. "I am grateful to you, ma'm."

"I am not concerned with your gratitude to me. There is One Above who has a prior claim."

The girl murmured, "How should I not know it?"

"To the ignorant it may seem that you are persevering in your sin."

"If they know my story, ma'm, they cannot think that."

"But they do think that. I am told they say you are looking for Satan's sails."

Sarah rose then and went to the window. It was early summer, and scent of syringa and lilac mingled with the blackbirds' songs. She gazed for a moment out over that sea she was asked to deny herself, then turned back to the old lady, who sat as implacably in her armchair as the Queen on her throne.

"Do you wish me to leave, ma'm?"

Mrs. Poulteney was inwardly shocked. Once again Sarah's simplicity took all the wind from her swelling spite. The voice, the other charms, to which she had become so addicted! Far worse, she might throw away the interest accruing to her on those heavenly ledgers. She moderated her tone.

"I wish you to show that this ... person is expunged from your heart. I know that he is. But you must show it."

"How am I to show it?"

"By walking elsewhere. By not exhibiting your shame. If for no other reason, because I request it."

Sarah stood with bowed head, and there was a silence. But then she looked Mrs. Poulteney in the eyes and for the first time since her arrival, she gave the faintest smile.

"I will do as you wish, ma'm."

It was, in chess terms, a shrewd sacrifice, since Mrs. Poulteney graciously went on to say that she did not want to deny her completely the benefits of the sea air and that she might on occasion walk by the sea; but not always by the sea-"and pray do not stand and stare so." It was, in short, a bargain struck between two obsessions. Sarah's offer to leave had let both women see the truth, in their different ways.

Sarah kept her side of the bargain, or at least that part of it that concerned the itinerary of her walks. She now went very rarely to the Cobb, though when she did, she still sometimes allowed herself to stand and stare, as on the day we have described. After all, the countryside around Lyme abounds in walks; and few of them do not give a view of the sea. If that had been all Sarah craved she had but to walk over the lawns of Marlborough House.

Mrs. Fairley, then, had a poor time of it for many months. No occasion on which the stopping and staring took place was omitted; but they were not frequent, and Sarah had by this time acquired a kind of ascendancy of suffering over Mrs. Poulteney that saved her from any serious criticism. And after all, as the spy and the mistress often reminded each other, poor "Tragedy" was mad.

You will no doubt have guessed the truth: that she was far less mad than she seemed ... or at least not mad in the way that was generally supposed. Her exhibition of her shame had a kind of purpose; and people with purposes know when they have been sufficiently attained and can be allowed to rest in abeyance for a while.

But one day, not a fortnight before the beginning of my story, Mrs. Fairley had come to Mrs. Poulteney with her creaking stays and the face of one about to announce the death of a close friend.

"I have something unhappy to communicate, ma'm."

This phrase had become as familiar to Mrs. Poulteney as a storm cone to a fisherman; but she observed convention.

"It cannot concern Miss Woodruff?"

"Would that it did not, ma'm." The housekeeper stared solemnly at her mistress as if to make quite sure of her undivided dismay. "But I fear it is my duty to tell you."

"We must never fear what is our duty."

"No, ma'm."

Still the mouth remained clamped shut; and a third party might well have wondered what horror could be coming. Nothing less than dancing naked on the altar of the parish church would have seemed adequate.

"She has taken to walking, ma'm, on Ware Commons."

Such an anticlimax! Yet Mrs. Poulteney seemed not to think so. Indeed her mouth did something extraordinary. It fell open.

10.

And once, but once, she lifted her eyes, And suddenly, sweetly, strangely blush'd To find they were met by my own ...

-Tennyson, Maud (1855)

. . . with its green chasms between romantic rocks, where the scattered forest trees and orchards of luxuriant growth declare that many a generation must have passed away since the first partial falling of the cliff prepared the ground for such a state, where a scene so wonderful and so lovely is exhibited, as may more than equal any of the resembling scenes of the far-famed Isle of Wight...

-Jane Austen, Persuasion

There runs, between Lyme Regis and Axmouth six miles to the west, one of the strangest coastal landscapes in Southern England. From the air it is not very striking; one notes merely that whereas elsewhere on the coast the fields run to the cliff edge, here they stop a mile or so short of it. The cultivated chequer of green and red-brown breaks, with a kind of joyous undiscipline, into a dark cascade of trees and undergrowth. There are no roofs. If one flies low enough one can see that the terrain is very abrupt, cut by deep chasms and accented by strange bluffs and towers of chalk and flint, which loom over the lush foliage around them like the walls of ruined castles. From the air ... but on foot this seemingly unimportant wilderness gains a strange extension. People have been lost in it for hours, and cannot believe, when they see on the map where they were lost, that their sense of isolation-and if the weather be bad, desolation-could have seemed so great.

The Undercliff-for this land is really the mile-long slope caused by the erosion of the ancient vertical cliff face-is very steep. Flat places are as rare as visitors in it. But this steepness in effect tilts it, and its vegetation, towards the sun; and it is this fact, together with the water from the countless springs that have caused the erosion, that lends the area its botanical strangeness-its wild arbutus and ilex and other trees rarely seen growing in England; its enormous ashes and beeches; its green Brazilian chasms choked with ivy and the liana of wild clematis; its bracken that grows seven, eight feet tall; its flowers that bloom a month earlier than anywhere else in the district. In summer it is the nearest this country can offer to a tropical jungle. It has also, like all land that has never been worked or lived on by man, its mysteries, its shadows, its dangers-only too literal ones geologically, since there are crevices and sudden falls that can bring disaster, and in places where a man with a broken leg could shout all week and not be heard. Strange as it may seem, it was slightly less solitary a hundred years ago than it is today. There is not a single cottage in the Undercliff now; in 1867 there were several, lived in by gamekeepers, woodmen, a pigherd or two. The roedeer, sure proof of abundant solitude, then must have passed less peaceful days. Now the Undercliff has reverted to a state of total wildness. The cottage walls have crumbled into ivied stumps, the old branch paths have gone; no car road goes near it, the one remaining track that traverses it is often impassable. And it is so by Act of Parliament: a national nature reserve. Not all is lost to expedience.

It was this place, an English Garden of Eden on such a day as March 29th, 1867, that Charles had entered when he had climbed the path from the shore at Pinhay Bay; and it was this same place whose eastern half was called Ware Commons.

When Charles had quenched his thirst and cooled his brow with his wetted handkerchief he began to look seriously around him. Or at least he tried to look seriously around him; but the little slope on which he found himself, the prospect before him, the sounds, the scents, the unalloyed wildness of growth and burgeoning fertility, forced him into anti-science. The ground about him was studded gold and pale yellow with celandines and primroses and banked by the bridal white of densely blossoming sloe; where jubilantly green-tipped elders shaded the mossy banks of the little brook he had drunk from were clusters of moschatel and woodsorrel, most delicate of English spring flowers. Higher up the slope he saw the white heads of anemones, and beyond them deep green drifts of bluebell leaves. A distant woodpecker drummed in the branches of some high tree, and bullfinches whistled quietly over his head; newly arrived chiffchaffs and willow warblers sang in every bush and treetop. When he turned he saw the blue sea, now washing far below; and the whole extent of Lyme Bay reaching round, diminishing cliffs that dropped into the endless yellow saber of the Chesil Bank, whose remote tip touched that strange English Gibraltar, Portland Bill, a thin gray shadow wedged between azures.

Only one art has ever caught such scenes-that of the Renaissance; it is the ground that Botticelli's figures walk on, the air that includes Ronsard's songs. It does not matter what that cultural revolution's conscious aims and purposes, its cruelties and failures were; in essence the Renaissance was simply the green end of one of civilization's hardest winters. It was an end to chains, bounds, frontiers. Its device was the only device: What is, is good. It was all, in short, that Charles's age was not; but do not think that as he stood there he did not know this. It is true that to explain his obscure feeling of malaise, of inappropriateness, of limitation, he went back closer home-to Rousseau, and the childish myths of a Golden Age and the Noble Savage. That is, he tried to dismiss the inadequacies of his own time's approach to nature by supposing that one cannot reenter a legend. He told himself he was too pampered, too spoiled by civilization, ever to inhabit nature again; and that made him sad, in a not unpleasant bittersweet sort of way. After all, he was a Victorian. We could not expect him to see what we are only just beginning-and with so much more knowledge and the lessons of existentialist philosophy at our disposal-to realize ourselves: that the desire to hold and the desire to enjoy are mutually destructive. His statement to himself should have been, "I possess this now, therefore I am happy," instead of what it so Victorianly was: "I cannot possess this forever, and therefore am sad."

Science eventually regained its hegemony, and he began to search among the beds of flint along the course of the stream for his tests. He found a pretty fragment of fossil scallop, but the sea urchins eluded him. Gradually he moved through the trees to the west, bending, carefully quartering the ground with his eyes, moving on a few paces, then repeating the same procedure. Now and then he would turn over a likely-looking flint with the end of his ashplant. But he had no luck. An hour passed, and his duty towards Ernestina began to outweigh his lust for echinoderms. He looked at his watch, repressed a curse, and made his way back to where he had left his rucksack. Some way up the slope, with the declining sun on his back, he came on a path and set off for Lyme. The path climbed and curved slightly inward beside an ivy-grown stone wall and then-in the unkind manner of paths- forked without indication. He hesitated, then walked some fifty yards or so along the lower path, which lay sunk in a transverse gully, already deeply shadowed. But then he came to a solution to his problem-not knowing exactly how the land lay-for yet another path suddenly branched to his right, back towards the sea, up a steep small slope crowned with grass, and from which he could plainly orientate himself. He therefore pushed up through the strands of bramble- the path was seldom used-to the little green plateau.

It opened out very agreeably, like a tiny alpine meadow. The white scuts of three or four rabbits explained why the turf was so short.

Charles stood in the sunlight. Eyebright and birdsfoot starred the grass, and already vivid green clumps of marjoram reached up to bloom. Then he moved forward to the edge of the plateau.

And there, below him, he saw a figure.

For one terrible moment he thought he had stumbled on a corpse. But it was a woman asleep. She had chosen the strangest position, a broad, sloping ledge of grass some five feet beneath the level of the plateau, and which hid her from the view of any but one who came, as Charles had, to the very edge. The chalk walls behind this little natural balcony made it into a sun trap, for its widest axis pointed southwest. But it was not a sun trap many would have chosen. Its outer edge gave onto a sheer drop of some thirty or forty feet into an ugly tangle of brambles. A little beyond them the real cliff plunged down to the beach.

Charles's immediate instinct had been to draw back out of the woman's view. He did not see who she was. He stood at a loss, looking at but not seeing the fine landscape the place commanded. He hesitated, he was about to withdraw; but then his curiosity drew him forward again.

The girl lay in the complete abandonment of deep sleep, on her back. Her coat had fallen open over her indigo dress, unrelieved in its calico severity except by a small white collar at the throat. The sleeper's face was turned away from him, her right arm thrown back, bent in a childlike way. A scattered handful of anemones lay on the grass around it. There was something intensely tender and yet sexual in the way she lay; it awakened a dim echo of Charles of a moment from his time in Paris. Another girl, whose name now he could not even remember, perhaps had never known, seen sleeping so, one dawn, in a bedroom overlooking the Seine.

He moved round the curving lip of the plateau, to where he could see the sleeper's face better, and it was only then that he realized whom he had intruded upon. It was the French Lieutenant's Woman. Part of her hair had become loose and half covered her cheek. On the Cobb it had seemed to him a dark brown; now he saw that it had red tints, a rich warmth, and without the then indispensable gloss of feminine hair oil. The skin below seemed very brown, almost ruddy, in that light, as if the girl cared more for health than a fashionably pale and languid-cheeked complexion. A strong nose, heavy eyebrows ... the mouth he could not see. It irked him strangely that he had to see her upside down, since the land would not allow him to pass round for the proper angle.

He stood unable to do anything but stare down, tranced by this unexpected encounter, and overcome by an equally strange feeling-not sexual, but fraternal, perhaps paternal, a certainty of the innocence of this creature, of her being unfairly outcast, and which was in turn a factor of his intuition of her appalling loneliness. He could not imagine what, besides despair, could drive her, in an age where women were semistatic, timid, incapable of sustained physical effort, to this wild place.

He came at last to the very edge of the rampart above her, directly over her face, and there he saw that all the sadness he had so remarked before was gone; in sleep the face was gentle, it might even have had the ghost of a smile. It was precisely then, as he craned sideways down, that she awoke.

She looked up at once, so quickly that his step back was in vain. He was detected, and he was too much a gentleman to deny it. So when Sarah scrambled to her feet, gathering her coat about her, and stared back up at him from her ledge, he raised his wideawake and bowed. She said nothing, but fixed him with a look of shock and bewilderment, perhaps not untinged with shame. She had fine eyes, dark eyes.

They stood thus for several seconds, locked in a mutual incomprehension. She seemed so small to him, standing there below him, hidden from the waist down, clutching her collar, as if, should he take a step towards her, she would turn and fling herself out of his sight. He came to his sense of what was proper.

"A thousand apologies. I came upon you inadvertently." And then he turned and walked away. He did not look back, but scrambled down to the path he had left, and back to the fork, where he wondered why he had not had the presence of mind to ask which path he was to take, and waited half a minute to see if she was following him. She did not appear. Very soon he marched firmly away up the steeper path.

Charles did not know it, but in those brief poised seconds above the waiting sea, in that luminous evening silence broken only by the waves' quiet wash, the whole Victorian Age was lost. And I do not mean he had taken the wrong path.

11.

With the form conforming duly, Senseless what it meaneth truly, Go to church-the world require you, To balls-the world require you too, And marry-papa and mama desire you, And your sisters and schoolfellows do.

-A. H. Clough, "Duty" (1841)

"Oh! no, what he!" she cried in scorn, "I woulden gi'e a penny vor'n; The best ov him's outzide in view; His cwoat is gay enough, 'tis true, But then the wold vo'k didden bring En up to know a single thing..."

-William Barnes, Poems in the Dorset Dialect (1869)

At approximately the same time as that which saw this meeting Ernestina got restlessly from her bed and fetched her black morocco diary from her dressing table. She first turned rather sulkily to her entry of that morning, which was certainly not very inspired from a literary point of view: "Wrote letter to Mama. Did not see dearest Charles. Did not go out, tho' it is very fine. Did not feel happy."

It had been a very did-not sort of day for the poor girl, who had had only Aunt Tranter to show her displeasure to. There had been Charles's daffodils and jonquils, whose perfume she now inhaled, but even they had vexed her at first. Aunt Tranter's house was small, and she had heard Sam knock on the front door downstairs; she had heard the wicked and irreverent Mary open it-a murmur of voices and then a distinct, suppressed gurgle of laughter from the maid, a slammed door. The odious and abominable suspicion crossed her mind that Charles had been down there, flirting; and this touched on one of her deepest fears about him.

She knew he had lived in Paris, in Lisbon, and traveled much; she knew he was eleven years older than herself; she knew he was attractive to women. His answers to her discreetly playful interrogations about his past conquests were always discreetly playful in return; and that was the rub. She felt he must be hiding something-a tragic French countess, a passionate Portuguese marquesa. Her mind did not allow itself to run to a Parisian grisette or an almond-eyed inn-girl at Cintra, which would have been rather nearer the truth. But in a way the matter of whether he had slept with other women worried her less than it might a modern girl. Of course Ernestina uttered her autocratic "I must not" just as soon as any such sinful speculation crossed her mind; but it was really Charles's heart of which she was jealous. That, she could not bear to think of having to share, either historically or presently. Occam's useful razor was unknown to her. Thus the simple fact that he had never really been in love became clear proof to Ernestina, on her darker days, that he had once been passionately so. His calm exterior she took for the terrible silence of a recent battlefield, Waterloo a month after; instead of for what it really was-a place without history.

When the front door closed, Ernestina allowed dignity to control her for precisely one and a half minutes, whereupon her fragile little hand reached out and peremptorily pulled the gilt handle beside her bed. A pleasantly insistent tinkle filtered up from the basement kitchen; and soon afterwards, there were footsteps, a knock, and the door opened to reveal Mary bearing a vase with a positive fountain of spring flowers. The girl came and stood by the bed, her face half hidden by the blossoms, smiling, impossible for a man to have been angry with-and therefore quite the reverse to Ernestina, who frowned sourly and reproachfully at this unwelcome vision of Flora.

Of the three young women who pass through these pages Mary was, in my opinion, by far the prettiest. She had infinitely the most life, and infinitely the least selfishness; and physical charms to match ... an exquisitely pure, if pink complexion, corn-colored hair and delectably wide gray-blue eyes, eyes that invited male provocation and returned it as gaily as it was given. They bubbled as the best champagne bubbles, irrepressibly; and without causing flatulence. Not even the sad Victorian clothes she had so often to wear could hide the trim, plump promise of her figure-indeed, "plump" is unkind. I brought up Ronsard's name just now; and her figure required a word from his vocabulary, one for which we have no equivalent in English: rondelet-all that is seductive in plumpness without losing all that is nice in slimness.

Mary's great-great-granddaughter, who is twenty-two years old this month I write in, much resembles her ancestor; and her face is known over the entire world, for she is one of the more celebrated younger English film actresses.

But it was not, I am afraid, the face for 1867. It had not, for instance, been at all the face for Mrs. Poulteney, to whom it had become familiar some three years previously. Mary was the niece of a cousin of Mrs. Fairley, who had wheedled Mrs. Poulteney into taking the novice into the unkind kitchen. But Marlborough House and Mary had suited each other as well as a tomb would a goldfinch; and when one day Mrs. Poulteney was somberly surveying her domain and saw from her upstairs window the disgusting sight of her stableboy soliciting a kiss, and not being very successfully resisted, the goldfinch was given an instant liberty; whereupon it flew to Mrs. Tranter's, in spite of Mrs. Poulteney's solemn warnings to that lady as to the foolhardiness of harboring such proven dissoluteness.

In Broad Street Mary was happy. Mrs. Tranter liked pretty girls; and pretty, laughing girls even better. Of course, Ernestina was her niece, and she worried for her more; but Ernestina she saw only once or twice a year, and Mary she saw every day. Below her mobile, flirtatious surface the girl had a gentle affectionateness; and she did not stint, she returned the warmth that was given. Ernestina did not know a dreadful secret of that house in Broad Street; there were times, if cook had a day off, when Mrs. Tranter sat and ate with Mary alone in the downstairs kitchen; and they were not the unhappiest hours in either of their lives.

Mary was not faultless; and one of her faults was a certain envy of Ernestina. It was not only that she ceased abruptly to be the tacit favorite of the household when the young lady from London arrived; but the young lady from London came also with trunkfuls of the latest London and Paris fashions, not the best recommendation to a servant with only three dresses to her name-and not one of which she really liked, even though the best of them she could really dislike only because it had been handed down by the young princess from the capital. She also thought Charles was a beautiful man for a husband; a great deal too good for a pallid creature like Ernestina. This was why Charles had the frequent benefit of those gray-and-periwinkle eyes when she opened the door to him or passed him in the street. In wicked fact the creature picked her exits and entrances to coincide with Charles's; and each time he raised his hat to her in the street she mentally cocked her nose at Ernestina; for she knew very well why Mrs. Tranter's niece went upstairs so abruptly after Charles's departures. Like all soubrettes, she dared to think things her young mistress did not; and knew it.

Having duly and maliciously allowed her health and cheerfulness to register on the invalid, Mary placed the flowers on the bedside commode.

"From Mr. Charles, Miss Tina. With 'er complimums." Mary spoke in a dialect notorious for its contempt of pronouns and suffixes.

"Place them on my dressing table. I do not like them so close."

Mary obediently removed them there and disobediently began to rearrange them a little before turning to smile at the suspicious Ernestina.

"Did he bring them himself?"

"No, miss."

"Where is Mr. Charles?"

"Doan know, miss. I didn' ask'un." But her mouth was pressed too tightly together, as if she wanted to giggle.

"But I heard you speak with the man."

"Yes, miss."

"What about?"

"'Twas just the time o' day, miss."

"Is that what made you laugh?"

"Yes, miss. 'Tis the way 'e speaks, miss."