“Why, what do you mean?” asked the don, his face suddenly growing grave, while his voice had not yet lost its humorous tone. “She has not eloped? You don’t mean to tell me she has run away from you?”
“I really don’t know what to say,” answered Maitland. “I’m afraid she has been run away with, that she is the victim of some plot or conspiracy.”
“You surely can’t mean what you say” (and now the voice was gruffer than ever). “People don’t plot and conspire nowadays, if ever they did, which probably they didn’t! And who are the young lady’s people? Why don’t they look after her? I had heard she was a widow, but she must have friends.”
“She is not a widow—she is an orphan,” said Maitland, blushing painfully. “I am her guardian in a kind of way.”
“Why, the wrong stories have reached me altogether! I’m sure I beg your pardon, but did you tell me her name?”
“Her name is Shields—Margaret Shields”—(“Not the name I was told,” muttered Bielby)—“and her father was a man who had been rather unsuccessful in life.”
“What was his profession, what did he do?”
“He had been a sailor, I think,” said the academic philanthropist; “but when I knew him he had left the sea, and was, in fact, as far as he was anything, a professional tattooer.”
“What’s that?”
“He tattooed patterns on sailors and people of that class for a livelihood.”