The cloth was laid by Lavvy. Bella, as the acknowledged ornament of the family, employed both her hands in giving her hair an additional wave while sitting in the easiest chair, and occasionally threw in a direction touching the supper: as, “Very brown, ma;” or, to her sister, “Put the saltcellar straight, miss, and don’t be a dowdy little puss.”

Meantime her father, chinking Mr. Rokesmith’s gold as he sat expectant between his knife and fork, remarked that six of those sovereigns came just in time for their landlord, and stood them in a little pile on the white tablecloth to look at.

“I hate our landlord!” said Bella.

But, observing a fall in her father’s face, she went and sat down by him at the table, and began touching up his hair with the handle of a fork. It was one of the girl’s spoilt ways to be always arranging the family’s hair⁠—perhaps because her own was so pretty, and occupied so much of her attention.