'And you could take no lodger but one of the old-lady type.'
'Horrid!' said Felix. 'Well, we will see; but it will be a great stroke on poor Cherry--she can remember nothing before this house.'
'It will be very good for her to have no old associations to sit brooding over.'
'My poor little Cherry! If I saw how to cheer up her life; but without your lessons it will be more dreary for her than ever!'
'Give her all you can to do, and do not be over-careful to keep your anxieties from her knowledge. She is very much of a woman, and if you leave her too much to herself, she will grow more introspective.'
'Wilmet and I have always wanted to shelter her; she never seems fit for trouble, and she is so young!'
'Compared with you two venerable people!' said Mr. Audley, smiling. 'But her mind is not young, and to treat her as a child is the way to make her prey upon herself. I wish her talent could be more cultivated; but meantime nothing is better for her than the care of Bernard and Stella. I hope you will not be in a hurry to promote them out of her hands.'
'Very well; but she will miss you sorely.'
'I hope to see her brightened before I am really gone, and I am not going to decamp from this house till some natural break comes. To do that would be absurd!'
There was a silence; and then Felix said with a sigh, 'Yes, a smaller house, and one servant. I will speak to Wilmet.'
'Perhaps you had better, so that she may have an answer in case she is attacked.'
Wilmet was aghast at first, but a hint from Alda made her acquiesce, not with blushing consciousness, but with the perception that the way of the world was against the retention of the lodger; and sorry as she was to lose Mr. Audley, her housewifely mind was not consoled, but distracted, by calculations on the difference of expenditure. Again she tried to beg herself off from her visit, in the dread that Felix would go and take some impracticable house in her absence--some place with thin walls, no cupboards, and no coal-hole; and she was only pacified by his solemn promise to decide on no house without her. She went away in an avalanche of kisses and tears, leaving Geraldine with a basketful of written instructions for every possible contingency, at which the anxious maiden sat gazing anxiously, trying to store her mind with its onerous directions.