“Ah! Then it’s hopeless—hopeless.”
He shook his head, and softly beat upon the hand he held, as though mutely asking her commiseration.
“I did not go to Mr. Edmund last night,” said Milly,—“You will listen to me just the same as if you did remember all?”
“To every syllable you say.”
“Both, because I did not know, then, that this really was his father, and because I was fearful of the effect of such intelligence upon him, after his illness, if it should be. Since I have known who this person is, I have not gone either; but that is for another reason. He has long been separated from his wife and son—has been a stranger to his home almost from this son’s infancy, I learn from him—and has abandoned and deserted what he should have held most dear. In all that time he has been falling from the state of a gentleman, more and more, until—” she rose up, hastily, and going out for a moment, returned, accompanied by the wreck that Redlaw had beheld last night.
“Do you know me?” asked the Chemist.
“I should be glad,” returned the other, “and that is an unwonted word for me to use, if I could answer no.”
The Chemist looked at the man, standing in self-abasement and degradation before him, and would have looked longer, in an ineffectual struggle for enlightenment, but that Milly resumed her late position by his side, and attracted his attentive gaze to her own face.
“See how low he is sunk, how lost he is!” she whispered, stretching out her arm towards him, without looking from the Chemist’s face. “If you could remember all that is connected with him, do you not think it would move your pity to reflect that one you ever loved (do not let us mind how long ago, or in what belief that he has forfeited), should come to this?”
“I hope it would,” he answered. “I believe it would.”