“And what of Florence’s sister?” said he, with a half furtive glance towards her.
“I hope, nothing less generous.”
“Then I am content,” said he, with a faint sigh. “When a man is as thoroughly ruined as I am, it might be thought he would be indifferent to opinion in every shape—and so I am, beyond the four walls of this room; but here,” and he looked at each in turn, “are the arbiters of my fate; if you will but be to me dear sisters—kind, compassionate, forgiving sisters—you will do more for this crushed and wounded heart, than all the sympathy of the whole world beside.”
“We only ask to be such to you,” cried Florence, eagerly: “and we feel how proud we could be of such a brother; but, above all, do not distress yourself now, by a theme so painful to touch on. Let the unhappy events of the last few weeks lie, if not forgotten, at least unmentioned, till you are calm and quiet enough to talk of them as old memories.”
“Yes! but how can I bear the thought of what others may say of me—meanwhile?”
“Who are these others—we see no one, we go into no society?”
“Have you not scores of dear friends, writing by every post to ask if this atrocious duellist be ‘your’ Mr. Calvert, and giving such a narrative, besides, of his doings, that a galley-slave would shrink from contact with such a man? Do I not know well how tenderly people deal with the vices that are not their own? How severe the miser can be on the spendthrift, and how mercilessly the coward condemns the hot blood that resents an injury, and how gladly they would involve in shame the character that would not brook dishonour?”
“Believe me, we have very few ‘dear friends’ at all,” said Florence, smiling, “and not one, no, not a single one of the stamp you speak of.”
“If you were only to read our humdrum letters,” chimed in Emily, “you’d see how they never treat of anything but little domestic details of people who live as obscurely as ourselves. How Uncle Tom’s boy has got into the Charterhouse; or Mary’s baby taken the chicken-pox.”
“But Loyd writes to you—and not in this strain?”