and again next morning, and again next night and morning: going down to the station, mingling with the people there, looking about him down all the avenues of railway, and beginning to take an interest in the incomings and outgoings of the trains. At first, he often put his head into Lamps’s little room, but he never found Lamps there. A pair or two of velveteen shoulders he usually found there, stooping over the fire, sometimes in connexion with a clasped knife and a piece of bread and meat; but the answer to his inquiry, “Where’s Lamps?” was, either that he was “t’other side the line,” or, that it was his off-time, or (in the latter case), his own personal introduction to another Lamps who was not his Lamps. However, he was not so desperately set upon seeing Lamps now, but he bore the disappointment. Nor did he so wholly devote himself to his severe application to the study of Mugby Junction, as to neglect exercise. On the contrary, he took a walk every day, and always the same walk. But the weather turned cold and wet again, and the window was never open.
III
At length, after a lapse of some days, there came another streak of fine bright hardy autumn weather. It was a Saturday. The window was open, and the children were gone. Not surprising, this, for he had patiently watched and waited at the corner, until they were gone.
“Good day,” he said to the face; absolutely getting his hat clear off his head this time.
“Good day to you, sir.”
“I am glad you have a fine sky again, to look at.”
“Thank you, sir. It is kind of you.”
“You are an invalid, I fear?”
“No, sir. I have very good health.”
“But are you not always lying down?”
“O yes, I am always lying down, because I cannot sit up. But I am not an invalid.”
The laughing eyes seemed highly to enjoy his great mistake.
“Would you mind taking the trouble to come in, sir? There is a beautiful view from this window. And you would see that I am not at all ill—being so good as to care.”
It was said to help him, as he stood irresolute, but evidently desiring to enter, with his diffident hand on the latch of the garden gate. It did help him, and he went in.
The room up-stairs was a very clean white room with a low roof. Its only inmate lay on a couch that brought her face on a level with the window. The couch was white too; and her simple dress or wrapper being light blue, like the band around her hair, she had an ethereal look, and a fanciful appearance of lying among clouds. He felt that she instinctively perceived him to be by habit a downcast taciturn man; it was another help to him to have established that understanding so easily, and got it over.
There was an awkward constraint upon him, nevertheless, as he touched her hand, and took a chair at the side of her couch.
“I see now,” he began, not at all fluently, “how you occupy your hands. Only seeing you from the path outside, I thought you were playing upon something.”
She was engaged in very nimbly and dexterously making lace. A lace-pillow lay upon her breast; and the quick movements and changes of her hands upon it as she worked, had given them the action he had misinterpreted.
“That is curious,” she answered, with a bright smile. “For I often fancy, myself, that I play tunes while I am at work.”
“Have you any musical knowledge?”
She shook her head.
“I think I could pick out tunes, if I had any instrument, which could be made as handy to me as my lace-pillow. But I dare say I deceive myself. At all events, I shall never know.”
“You have a musical voice. Excuse me; I have heard you sing.”
“With the children?” she answered, slightly colouring. “O yes. I sing with the dear children, if it can be called singing.”
Barbox Brothers glanced at the two small forms in the room, and hazarded the speculation that she was fond of children, and that she was learned in new systems of teaching them? “Very fond of them,” she said, shaking her head again; “but I know nothing of teaching, beyond the interest I have in it, and the pleasure it gives me when they learn. Perhaps your overhearing my little scholars sing some of their lessons, has led you so far astray as to think me a grand teacher? Ah! I thought so! No, I have only read and been told about that system. It seemed so pretty and pleasant, and to treat them so like the merry Robins they are, that I took up with it in my little way. You don’t need to be told what a very little way mine is, sir,” she added, with a glance at the small forms and round the room.
All this time her hands were busy at her lace-pillow. As they still continued so, and as there was a kind of substitute for conversation in the click and play of its pegs, Barbox Brothers took the opportunity of observing her. He guessed her to be thirty. The charm of her transparent face and large bright brown eyes, was, not that they were passively resigned, but that they were actively and thoroughly cheerful. Even her busy hands, which of their own thinness alone might have besought compassion, plied their task with a gay courage that made mere compassion an unjustifiable assumption of superiority, and an impertinence.
He saw her eyes in the act of rising towards his, and he directed his towards the prospect, saying: “Beautiful indeed!”
“Most beautiful, sir. I have sometimes had a fancy that I would like to sit up, for once, only to try how it looks to an erect head. But what a foolish fancy that would be to encourage! It cannot look more lovely to any one than it does to me.”
Her eyes were turned to it as she spoke, with most delighted admiration and enjoyment. There was not a trace in it of any sense of deprivation.
“And those threads of railway, with their puffs of smoke and steam changing places so fast, make it so lively for me,” she went on. “I think of the number of people who can go where they wish, on their business, or their pleasure; I remember that the puffs make signs to me that they are actually going while I look; and that enlivens the prospect with abundance of company, if I want company. There is the great Junction, too. I don’t see it under the foot of the hill, but I can very often hear it, and I always know it is there. It seems to join me, in a way, to I don’t know how many places and things that I shall never see.”
With an abashed kind of idea that it might have already joined himself to something he had never seen, he said constrainedly: “Just so.”
“And so you see, sir,” pursued Phœbe, “I am not the invalid you thought me, and I am very well off indeed.”
“You have a happy disposition,” said Barbox Brothers: perhaps with a slight excusatory touch for his own disposition.
“Ah! But you should know my father,” she replied. “His is the happy disposition!—Don’t mind, sir!” For his reserve took the alarm at a step upon the stairs, and he distrusted that he would be set down for a troublesome intruder. “This is my father coming.”
The door opened, and the father paused there.
“Why,
