'Yes,' said Harry, 'he has certainly got into a better office.'
'And he will do well there?'
'I am sure he will. It was impossible he should do well at that other place. No man could do so. He is quite an altered man now. The only fault I find with him is that he is so full of his heroes and heroines.'
'So he is, Harry; he is always asking me what he is to do with some forlorn lady or gentleman, 'Oh, smother her!' I said the other day. 'Well,' said he, with a melancholy gravity, 'I'll try it; but I fear it won't answer.' Poor Charley! what a friend you have been to him, Harry!'
'A friend!' said Mrs. Woodward, who was still true to her adoration of Norman. 'Indeed he has been a friend—a friend to us all. Who is there like him?'
Gertrude could have found it in her heart to go back to the subject of old days, and tell her mother that there was somebody much better even than Harry Norman. But the present was hardly a time for such an assertion of her own peculiar opinion.
'Yes, Harry,' she said, 'we have all much, too much, to thank you for. I have to thank you on his account.'
'Oh no,' said he, ungraciously; 'there is nothing to thank me for,—not on his account. Your mother and Captain Cuttwater——' and then he stopped himself. What he meant was that he had sacrificed his little fortune—for at the time his elder brother had still been living—not to rescue, or in attempting to rescue, his old friend from misfortune—not, at least, because that man had been his friend; but because he was the husband of Gertrude Woodward, and of Mrs. Woodward's daughter. Could he have laid bare his heart, he would have declared that Alaric Tudor owed him nothing; that he had never forgiven, never could forgive, the wrongs he had received from him; but that he had forgiven Alaric's wife; and that having done so in the tenderness of his heart, he had been ready to give up all that he possessed for her protection. He would have spared Gertrude what pain he could; but he would not lie, and speak of Alaric Tudor with affection.
'But there is, Harry; there is,' said Gertrude; 'much—too much —greatly too much. It is that now weighs me down more than anything. Oh! Harry, how are we to pay to you all this money?'
'It is with Mrs. Woodward,' said he coldly, 'and Captain Cuttwater, not with me, that you should speak of that. Mr. Tudor owes me nothing.'