"I like to hear you. Some day you must say more." She had often herself spoken some such words to a sufferer in a cottage, because she supposed that she ought. It was a different matter to hear them uttered out of a girl's own experience. But she was shy of pursuing the subject just then. "Can you ever get out for walks?" she asked.
"When it is warm enough I sit in the garden."
"And—church?"
"It is too far off, and I can't sit up for so long. Last time I tried, the pain got so bad that I fainted."
"Have you no friends to come and see you?"
"Oh, yes—there's—" and she hesitated. "We left most of our friends in Norfolk."
"Did you like coming?"
"Uncle wanted mother; and she thought we ought. He was alone—and this had been her home when she was a girl—till she went to be trained as a nurse."
"And she nursed Miss Stirling—when was that?"
"When Miss Stirling was quite a little child. And then mother married. I think uncle didn't much like mother's marriage. She saw nothing of him, or he of her, for years and years after."