and no nothink! Them boxes is Miss Spruce's. She's agoing now, this minute. You'll find 'em all upstairs in the drawen-room.' So upstairs into the drawing-room he went, and there he found the mother and daughter, and with them Miss Spruce, tightly packed up in her bonnet and shawl. 'Don't, mother,' Amelia was saying; 'what's the good of going on in that way? If she chooses to go, let her go.'
'But she's been with me now so many years,' said Mrs Roper, sobbing; 'and I've always done everything for her! Haven't I, now, Sally Spruce?' It struck Eames immediately that, though he had been an inmate in the house for two years, he had never before heard that maiden lady's Christian name. Miss Spruce was the first to see Eames as he entered the room. It is probable that Mrs Roper's pathos might have produced some answering pathos on her part had she remained unobserved, but the sight of a young man brought her back to her usual state of quiescence. 'I'm only an old woman,' said she; 'and here's Mr Eames come back again.'
'How d'ye do, Mrs Roper? how d'ye do, Amelia?—how d'ye do, Miss Spruce?' and he shook hands with them all.
'Oh, laws,' said Mrs Roper, 'you have given me such a start!'
'Dear me, Mr Eames; only think of your coming back in that way,' said Amelia.
'Well, what way should I come back? You didn't hear me knock at the door, that's all. So Miss Spruce is really going to leave you?'
'Isn't it dreadful, Mr Eames? Nineteen years we've been together;—taking both houses together, Miss Spruce, we have, indeed.' Miss Spruce, at this point, struggled very hard to convince John Eames that the period in question had in truth extended over only eighteen years, but Mrs Roper was authoritative, and would not permit it. 'It's nineteen years if it's a day. No one ought to know dates if I don't, and there isn't one in the world understands her ways unless it's me. Haven't I been up to your bedroom every night, and with my own hand given you—' But she stopped herself, and was too good a woman to declare before a young man what had been the nature of her nightly ministrations to her guest.
'I don't think you'll be so comfortable anywhere else, Miss Spruce,' said Eames.
'Comfortable! of course she won't,' said Amelia. 'But if I was mother I wouldn't have any more words about it.'
'It isn't the money I'm thinking of, but the feeling of it,' said Mrs Roper. 'The house will be so lonely like. I shan't know myself; that I shan't. And now that things are all settled so pleasantly, and that the Lupexes must go on Tuesday—I'll tell you what, Sally; I'll pay for the cab myself, and I'll start off to Dulwich by the omnibus to-morrow, and settle it all out of my own pocket. I will indeed. Come; there's the cab. Let me go down, and send him away.'
'I'll do that,' said Eames. 'It's only sixpence, off the stand,' Mrs Roper called to him as he left the room. But the cabman got a shilling, and John, as he returned, found Jemima in the act of carrying Miss Spruce's boxes back to her room. 'So much the better for poor Caudle,' said he to himself. 'As he has gone into the trade it's well that he should have somebody that will pay him.'
Mrs Roper followed Miss Spruce up the stairs and Johnny was left with Amelia. 'He's written to you, I know,' said she, with her face turned a little away from him. She was certainly very handsome, but there was a hard, cross, almost sullen look about her, which robbed her countenance of all its pleasantness. And yet she had no intention of being sullen with him.
'Yes,' said John. 'He has told me how it's all going to be.'
'Well?' she said.
'Well?' said he.
'Is that all you've got to say?'
'I'll congratulate you, if you'll let me.'
'Psha;—congratulations! I hate such humbug. If you've no feelings about it, I'm sure that I've none. Indeed I don't know what's the good of feelings. They never did me any good. Are you engaged to marry L. D.?'
'No, I am not.'
'And you've nothing else to say to me?'
'Nothing,—except my hopes for your happiness. What else can I say? You are engaged to marry my friend Cradell, and I think it will be a happy match.'
She turned away her face further from him, and the look of it became even more sullen. Could it be possible that at such a moment she still had a hope that he might come back to her?
'Good-bye, Amelia,' he said, putting out his hand to her.
'And this is to be the last of you in this house!'
