At the street corner he stopped. Looking at his guest with a troubled face, he said that their ways were widely different, and that he must here take his leave. The Old Gentleman would have spoken, but the other hurried quickly away, and was soon lost in the darkness.
Chapter II.
DRIVEN FROM HOME.
The Old Gentleman lingered about the street for two long hours; for he could not tear himself away from the place. Nor could he help thinking of all the harm that might come to the child shut up alone in the old gloomy shop; and he wondered what it was that took the old man from his home so late at night.
The child had told him that she always stayed there quite alone; so that it was clearly the usual thing for the old man to spend the night away from his home.
At last, quite tired out with watching and thinking, the Old Gentleman hired a coach and drove to his own home. A week later, however, he paid a second visit to the Old Curiosity Shop to learn something more of the strange old man and his beautiful grandchild.
He found that the old dealer had a visitor, a young man of about twenty-one, with a bold but handsome face and a careless, impudent manner. "I tell you again," the young fellow was saying as the Old Gentleman entered, "that I want to see Nell my sister."
The old man gave an angry reply, and the visitor soon gathered that what the young fellow really wanted was not so much to see Little Nell as to wring from her grandfather some of his money, which he said was being hoarded to no purpose.
The old man gave an angry reply