"Oh, no!" replied she, throwing her brush on to the table, as if startled into politeness. "I am not so beset with visitors, but that I can readily spare a few minutes to the few that do favour me with their company."
"You have almost completed your painting," said I, approaching to observe it more closely, and surveying it with a greater degree of admiration and delight than I cared to express. "A few more touches in the foreground will finish it I should think.—But why have you called it Fernley Manor, Cumberland, instead of Wildfell Hall, shire?" I asked, alluding to the name she had traced in small characters at the bottom of the canvass.
But immediately I was sensible of having committed an act of impertinence in so doing; for she coloured and hesitated; but after a moment's pause, with a kind of desperate frankness, she replied,—
"Because I have friends—acquaintances at least—in the world, from whom I desire my
