The next day came and brought no second letter.
Fanny was disappointed. She could still think of little
else all the morning; but, when her father came back
in the afternoon with the daily newspaper as usual,
she was so far from expecting any elucidation through such
a channel that the subject was for a moment out of her head.
She was deep in other musing. The remembrance of her first
evening in that room, of her father and his newspaper,
came across her. No candle was now wanted.
The sun was yet an hour and half above the horizon.
She felt that she had, indeed, been three months there;
and the sun's rays falling strongly into the parlour,
instead of cheering, made her still more melancholy,
for sunshine appeared to her a totally different thing
in a town and in the country. Here, its power was only
a glare: a stifling, sickly glare, serving but to bring
forward stains and dirt that might otherwise have slept.
There was neither health nor gaiety in sunshine in a town.
She sat in a blaze of oppressive heat, in a cloud of
moving dust, and her eyes could only wander from the walls,
marked by her father's head, to the table cut and notched
by her brothers, where stood the tea-board never
thoroughly cleaned, the cups and saucers wiped in streaks,
the milk a mixture of motes floating in thin blue,
and the bread and butter growing every minute more
greasy than even Rebecca's hands had first produced it.
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