I answered that she had given no hint of any such intention.
'Perhaps,' said my mother, 'Mr. Glover being by restrained her.'
'Perhaps,' I replied curtly.
As the tone in which I spoke denoted that I did not wish to continue the conversation, my mother said nothing more. Not that she had grown indifferent to the subject upon which we were conversing, but that she studied my moods more closely than ever. Her heart had never been stirred by such tender love for me as during this time; it showed itself in a thousand little undemonstrative ways, and with a delicate cunning which I am sure has never been excelled, she said and did precisely the things which were most comforting to me. I have only her to thank that my sorrow did not make a cynic of me.
My thoughts ran so much upon Mr. Glover, that I dreamt of him frequently in connection with some singular fancies. The principal persons who played parts in these dreams were we two and Jessie. In one of my dreams he was standing on a height, with his fingers to his mouth, curling his moustache into it as usual; I stood below, at a great distance from him; and Jessie was midway between us. He was beckoning to Jessie, saying in a boastful tone that he was a gentleman and a man of honour, and Jessie was walking towards him. In another of my dreams he was standing over me, preaching the same text. In another, Turk was very seriously impressing upon me the fact that Mr. Glover came from a highly-respectable family, and that it was a thing to be proud of. This was the leading idea of all my dreams.
I did not go again to see Jessie at the rehearsals. I knew I had no right to be in the theatre on those occasions, and I did not intend to give Mr. Glover a chance of placing me in an unpleasant position. I had scarcely a hope of seeing Jessie at our house; my mother thought differently, saying that in certain things she was seldom mistaken, and this was one of them. It was known to me that she had never ceased making inquiries for uncle Bryan, and that she had taken many and many a journey about London in the hope of finding him. I did not question her as to the result of these inquiries, and she herself was silent on the subject.
'Oh,' said Josey West to me, a couple of days after I had seen Jessie, 'so you've seen her.'
'Yes, Josey,' I replied, 'I have seen her.'
'And never told me!' she exclaimed.
'Why should I tell you, Josey? You have kept things from me which I think you might have told me, without doing any great harm.'