"How are you? This is a most
unexpected pleasure."
"How do you do, Mr. Bingham?" answered the old man, while he seated
himself nervously in a chair, placing his hat with a trembling hand
upon the floor beside him. "Yes, thank you, I am pretty well, not very
grand--worn out with trouble as the sparks fly upwards," he added, with
a vague automatic recollection of the scriptural quotation.
"I hope that Miss Elizabeth and Be--that your daughters are well also,"
said Geoffrey, unable to restrain his anxiety.
"Yes, yes, thank you, Mr. Bingham. Elizabeth isn't very grand either,
complains of a pain in her chest, a little bilious perhaps--she always
is bilious in the spring."
"And Miss Beatrice?"
"Oh, I think she's well--very quiet, you know, and a little pale,
perhaps; but she is always quiet--a strange woman Beatrice, Mr. Bingham,
a very strange woman, quite beyond me! I do not understand her, and
don't try to. Not like other women at all, takes no pleasure in things
seemingly; curious, with her good looks--very curious. But nobody
understands Beatrice."
Geoffrey breathed a sigh of relief.
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