Chapter 9 - Page 2

kindness, but the "talking over" on which they had evidently
counted was Dead Sea fruit on her lips; and just beyond the
familiar warmth of their presences she saw the form of Solitude at
her door.

Ann Eliza was but a small person to harbour so great a guest,
and a trembling sense of insufficiency possessed her. She had no
high musings to offer to the new companion of her hearth. Every
one of her thoughts had hitherto turned to Evelina and shaped
itself in homely easy words; of the mighty speech of silence she
knew not the earliest syllable.

Everything in the back room and the shop, on the second day
after Evelina's going, seemed to have grown coldly unfamiliar. The
whole aspect of the place had changed with the changed conditions
of Ann Eliza's life. The first customer who opened the shop-door
startled her like a ghost; and all night she lay tossing on her
side of the bed, sinking now and then into an uncertain doze from
which she would suddenly wake to reach out her hand for Evelina.
In the new silence surrounding her the walls and furniture found
voice, frightening her at dusk and midnight with strange sighs
and stealthy whispers. Ghostly hands shook the window shutters or
rattled at the outer latch, and once she grew cold at the sound of
a step like Evelina's stealing through the dark shop to die out on
the threshold. In time, of course, she found an explanation for
these noises, telling herself that the bedstead was warping, that
Miss Mellins trod heavily overhead, or that the thunder of passing
beer-waggons shook the door-latch; but the hours leading up to
these conclusions were full of the floating terrors that harden
into fixed foreboding. Worst of all were the solitary meals, when
she absently continued to set aside the largest slice of pie for
Evelina, and to let the tea grow cold while she waited for her
sister to help herself to the first cup. Miss Mellins, coming in
on one of these sad repasts, suggested the acquisition of a cat;
but Ann Eliza shook her head. She had never been used to animals,
and she felt the vague shrinking of the pious from creatures
divided from her by the abyss of soullessness.

At length, after ten empty days, Evelina's first letter came.

"My dear Sister," she wrote, in her pinched Spencerian hand,
"it seems strange to be in this great City so far from home alone
with him I have chosen for life, but marriage has its solemn duties
which those who are not can never hope to understand, and happier
perhaps for this reason, life for them has only simple tasks and
pleasures, but those who must take thought for others must be
prepared to do their duty in whatever station it has pleased the
Almighty to call them. Not that I have cause to