“Pshaw! nonsense! don't catechise me!” replied Miss Sowersoft, as she tripped down stairs; while the doctor, half in soliloquy and half addressing Miss Sowersoft, remarked, in allusion to Fanny, “She's a damsel of some spirit too!” Then addressing the girl herself, “Are you the little girl I saw at Mrs. Clink's when this boy was born?”
“Yes, sir, I am,” answered Fanny, as her passion sunk almost to nothing, and she blushed to be so questioned.
“Ah, indeed!” cried Doctor Rowel. “Well, I should not have thought it. Why, you are quite a fine young woman now. Dear-a-me! I had quite lost sight of you. I could not have believed it. Humph!” And the doctor surveyed her fair proportions with something of astonishment, and a great deal of satisfaction. To think that from such a little pale, half-fed, unhappy thing of work and thought beyond her years as she then was, there should have sprung up the full-sized, the pretty featured, and naturally genteel-looking girl now before him! But then, he had not that benefit which the reader enjoys, of reflecting how worldly circumstances, how poverty and plenty, sway the tempers of mankind; and that, as Mistress Clink's circumstances improved, so had Fanny improved likewise; and from seven or eight years old upwards, Fanny had enjoyed a much more comfortable home than, on his first introduction to her, might reasonably have been expected.
Doctor Rowel resumed his conversation.
“And how came you to be put to service so very early? for you had not, if I remember rightly, either health or strength to recommend you.”
Colin's eyes as he lay were fixed, as it might have been the eyes of a picture, on the doctor's countenance.
“I don't know, I'm sure, sir,” replied Fanny: but after a few moments' hesitation, added, “I suppose it was because I had no friends.”
“No friends!” the doctor repeated,—“why, where's your father and mother?”
“I never knew them, sir.”
“Indeed! never knew them!”