The gardener's wife (charged with looking after the accommodation of the
ladies) met me in the first-floor corridor. This excellent woman
treats me with an excessive civility which is plainly the offspring of
down-right terror. She stares, trembles, and curtseys, whenever I speak
to her. On my asking for Miss Verinder, she stared, trembled, and would
no doubt have curtseyed next, if Miss Verinder herself had not cut that
ceremony short, by suddenly opening her sitting-room door.
"Is that Mr. Jennings?" she asked.
Before I could answer, she came out eagerly to speak to me in the
corridor. We met under the light of a lamp on a bracket. At the first
sight of me, Miss Verinder stopped, and hesitated. She recovered herself
instantly, coloured for a moment--and then, with a charming frankness,
offered me her hand.
"I can't treat you like a stranger, Mr. Jennings," she said. "Oh, if you
only knew how happy your letters have made me!"
She looked at my ugly wrinkled face, with a bright gratitude so new to
me in my experience of my fellow-creatures, that I was at a loss how to
answer her. Nothing had prepared me for her kindness and her beauty.
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