Never free from
such uneasiness when she was with her affianced husband, it was not
likely that she would be free from it when they were apart. To-
day, too, she was cast in upon herself, and deprived of the relief
of talking freely with her new friend, because the quarrel had been
with Helena's brother, and Helena undisguisedly avoided the subject
as a delicate and difficult one to herself. At this critical time,
of all times, Rosa's guardian was announced as having come to see
her.
Mr. Grewgious had been well selected for his trust, as a man of
incorruptible integrity, but certainly for no other appropriate
quality discernible on the surface. He was an arid, sandy man,
who, if he had been put into a grinding-mill, looked as if he would
have ground immediately into high-dried snuff. He had a scanty
flat crop of hair, in colour and consistency like some very mangy
yellow fur tippet; it was so unlike hair, that it must have been a
wig, but for the stupendous improbability of anybody's voluntarily
sporting such a head. The little play of feature that his face
presented, was cut deep into it, in a few hard curves that made it
more like work; and he had certain notches in his forehead, which
looked as though Nature had been about to touch them into
sensibility or refinement, when she had impatiently thrown away the
chisel, and said: 'I really cannot be worried to finish off this
man; let him go as he is.
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