"I don't know that Ellen's marriage will not be the best thing that could possibly happen for me," said Hester to herself as she walked briskly away from Robert Streightley's house, after her parley with old Alice. "Of course her brother won't oppose it,--though the girl is a greater fool than I thought her, to marry a man with no greater ambition than to spend his life among filthy savages, teaching them a religion entirely unsuitable to their condition of life and status in creation. I hope they won't eat him--at least I hope they won't eat _her_; but she will be better away--I should never succeed in curing her of Brixton ways, and she has really no tastes to be developed. It will be a good opportunity, when she will be divided between love for her Decimus--what a name to be in love with!--and distress at leaving her mother, to furnish her with a suggestion concerning a substitute: it must come entirely from her, of course."
Thus thinking, Hester Gould reached home. She greeted aunt Lavinia kindly; she was scrupulously dutiful and attentive to her wishes, except in respect to meetings and ministers;--sat down cheerfully to her tea, during which meal she quite enlivened the pensive spinster by her gaiety, and then went to her piano for what she called a "real good practice." Hour after hour she sat there, filling the room and the house with music; and at length she sang, at her aunt's request, the very same song--of a trifling kind, which Hester rather despised, but sang because it was popular--with which Katherine Guyon was at the selfsame hour achieving the "final pulverisation" of Robert Streightley's heart.
The summer sun, bright, warm, and cheering, only just past the zenith of his annual glory, illumined the Temple Gardens; still further withering the turf, which had been worn by the promenaders of the season into a very bald and ragged state; gladdening the hearts of country-bred nursemaids with reminiscences of their earlier days, when their virgin hearts were yet untouched by the charms of deceivers in military or police uniforms; loved and cherished by the valetudinarians, poor and old, to whom this city garden was the nearest imitation of God's country which they were able to afford, and who, secluded during the winter in Strand side-street lodging-houses, ventured thither for their daily meed of light and air; glancing merrily on the turbid Thames; and even throwing enlivening glances into the topmost story of the house in Crown-Office Row, which Robert Streightley had visited one memorable night, and wherein one of its joint tenants now sat hard at work.
