We all confirmed it from our night’s experience.

“To be sure, to be sure!” said Mr Jarndyce. “However, Rick, Esther, and you too, Ada, for I don’t know that even your little purse is safe from his inexperience — I must have a promise all round, that nothing of this sort shall ever be done any more. No advances! Not even sixpences.”

We all promised faithfully; Richard, with a merry glance at me, touching his pocket, as if to remind me that there was no danger of our transgressing.

“As to Skimpole,” said Mr Jarndyce, “a habitable doll’s house, with good board, and a few tin people to get into debt with and borrow money of, would set the boy up in life. He is in a child’s sleep by this time, I suppose; it’s time I should take my craftier head to my more worldly pillow. Good night, my dears. God bless you!”

He peeped in again, with a smiling face, before we had lighted our candles, and said, “O! I have been looking at the weather-cock. I find it was a false alarm about the wind. It’s in the south!” And went away, singing to himself.

Ada and I agreed, as we talked together for a little while up-stairs, that this caprice about the wind was a fiction; and that he used the pretence to account for any disappointment he could not conceal, rather than he would blame the real cause of it, or disparage or depreciate any one. We thought this very characteristic of his eccentric gentleness; and of the difference between him and those petulant people who make the weather and the winds (particularly that unlucky wind which he had chosen for such a different purpose) the stalking-horses of their splenetic and gloomy humours.

Indeed, so much affection for him had been added in this one evening to my gratitude, that I hoped I already began to understand him through that mingled feeling. Any seeming inconsistencies in Mr Skimpole, or in Mrs Jellyby, I could not expect to be able to reconcile; having so little experience or practical knowledge. Neither did I try; for my thoughts were busy when I was alone, with Ada and Richard, and with the confidence I had seemed to receive concerning them. My fancy, made a little wild by the wind perhaps, would not consent to be all unselfish either, though I would have persuaded it to be so if I could. It wandered back to my godmother’s house, and came along the intervening track, raising up shadowy speculations which had sometimes trembled there in the dark, as to what knowledge Mr Jarndyce had of my earliest history — even as to the possibility of his being my father — though that idle dream was quite gone now.

It was all gone now, I remembered, getting up from the fire. It was not for me to muse over bygones, but to act with a cheerful spirit and a grateful heart. So I said to myself, “Esther, Esther, Esther! Duty, my dear!” and gave my little basket of housekeeping keys such a shake, that they sounded like little bells, and rang me hopefully to bed.