“How kind you are! Where did you learn it all?”
“I don’t know. But I am so sorry for you,” replied Nell, looking rather abashed, but speaking with such evident sincerity, that Gertrude began to think there was some good left in life after all, and a ray of hope stole into her heart.
“Go to mother now, will you, please? I think father is lying down in there too; but you won’t mind, will you? It will be such a comfort to them to know that some one has come to help us.”
Nell went off then to the darkened room at the end of the house, where the mother lay sick with misery and broken hopes. It was such a grand chamber, too, with a flowery paper on the walls, a flowery carpet on the floor, and curtains to the bed, as well as the window. The new-comer stood still on the threshold, quite amazed at so much magnificence, and scarcely liking to walk across the carpet to the bed, through fear of spoiling it with her worn old boots.
Abe Lorimer was not in bed, but sitting in a rocking-chair, looking very ill and wretched.
“Come in,” he said, in his slow, quiet tones, looking at Nell with vague curiosity, as if he wondered who she was, yet did not care very much about the matter at all.
“Who’s that?” demanded a querulous voice from the bed.
Whereupon Nell ventured across the carpet on tiptoe, and stood where Mrs. Lorimer could see her.
“If you please I’ve come to help,” she said, finding it difficult to repress a shiver, for the woman on the bed reminded her in a roundabout fashion of Mrs. Gunnage, and it was a reminder which brought no pleasure with it.
“Who are you?” asked Mrs. Lorimer, surveying Nell with measuring eyes, which took in every detail of her appearance, from the masses of dark, rather untidy hair crowning her head, down to the worn boots, which were her private mortification just then.