'I understand it all. You must not think I am angry with you. I know how good you were about it. But Charley, you may have it back now; here it is;' and putting her hand under the pillow, she took it out, carefully folded up in new tissue paper. 'There, Charley, you must never part with it again as long as there are two threads of it together; but I know you never will; and Charley, you must never talk of it to anybody but to your wife; and you must tell her all about it.'
He took the purse, and put it to his lips, and then pressed it to his heart. 'No,' said he, 'I will never part with it again. I think I can promise that.' 'And now, dearest, good-bye,' said she; 'dearest, dearest Charley, good-bye; perhaps we shall know each other in heaven. Kiss me, Charley, before you go,' So he stooped down over her, and pressed his lips to hers.
Charley, leaving the room, found Mrs. Woodward at the other end of the passage, standing at the door of her own dressing-room. 'You are to go to her now,' he said. 'Good-bye,' and without further speech to any of them he hurried out of the house.
None but Mrs. Woodward had seen him; but she saw that the tears were streaming down his cheeks as he passed her, and she expressed no surprise that he had left the Cottage without going through the formality of making his adieux.
And then he walked up to town, as Norman once had done after a parting interview with her whom he had loved. It might be difficult to say which at the moment suffered the bitterest grief.
CHAPTER XLIII. — MILLBANK
The immediate neighbourhood of Millbank Penitentiary is not one which we should, for its own sake, choose for our residence, either on account of its natural beauty, or the excellence of its habitations. That it is a salubrious locality must be presumed from the fact that it has been selected for the site of the institution in question; but salubrity, though doubtless a great recommendation, would hardly reconcile us to the extremely dull, and one might almost say, ugly aspect which this district bears.
To this district, however, ugly as it is, we must ask our readers to accompany us, while we pay a short visit to poor Gertrude. It was certainly a sad change from her comfortable nursery and elegant drawing-room near Hyde Park. Gertrude had hitherto never lived in an ugly house. Surbiton Cottage and Albany Place were the only two homes that she remembered, and neither of them was such as to give her much fitting preparation for the melancholy shelter which she found at No. 5, Paradise Row, Millbank.