They were very pleasant evenings, those that Maxwell and I spent with the Talboys. Maxwell, I think, enjoyed them almost as much as I did. He was not a man who was given to falling easily in love, and, although he was about my own age—that is to say eight-and-twenty, or thereabouts—he had a fatherly protecting way of treating little Emmie Talboys that was really very amusing. He looked upon her as a mere child, and bought playthings and sweetmeats without number for her. He had no hesitation in calling her by her Christian name, as soon as he knew what it was; and his elderly didactic manner caused her to look upon his doing so as a matter of course. We used to sit by the fire-light on the long winter evenings, and Mrs. Talboys would take counsel with Maxwell on such points of domestic economy as had turned up to perplex her during the day, while I sat by the battered old piano, and listened to Emmie's pure and gentle voice, as she sang "On the Banks of Allan Water," "The Bailiff's Daughter of Islington," or some other simple plaintive ballad which lay within the compass of her unpretending powers. Maxwell and I used often to take them to the theatre, to which we had no difficulty in obtaining free admission; and it was refreshing to a couple of battered theatrical hacks like ourselves, who had seen every piece that had been produced in London during the last ten years or so, to witness the childlike interest that the little woman took even in the common-place hackneyed incidents of the wretched farce that played the audience out. At other times, Mrs. Talboys and Emmie would spend the evening with us at our chambers; on which
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Maxwell and I.
