"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.

"And how are tithes being paid, Mr.
Granger?
not very grandly, I fear.