I said I had heard of his illness in the winter, and was glad to find him so much recovered:—how long had he been about again?
“How long? Indeed I forget. I am so apt to forget things now. Except “—he added bitterly—“the clerk's stool and the office window with the spider-webs over it—and the thirty shillings a-week. That's my income, Dora—I beg your pardon, Miss Dora,—I forgot I was no longer a gentleman, but a clerk at thirty shillings a-week.”
I said, I did not see why that should make him less of a gentleman; and, broken-down as he was,—sitting crouching over the fire with his sickly cheek passed against that rosy one,—I fancied I saw something of the man—the honest, true man—flash across the forlorn aspect of poor Francis Charteris.
I would have liked to stay and talk with him, and said so, but my sister was outside.
“Is she? will she be coming in here?”—And he shrank nervously into his corner. “I have been so ill, you know.”
He need not be afraid, I told him—we should have driven off in two minutes. There was not the slightest chance of their meeting—in all human probability he would never meet her more.
“Never more!”
I had not thought to see him so much affected.
“You were right, Dora, I never did deserve Penelope—yet there is something I should like to have said to her. Stop, hold back the curtain—she cannot see me sitting here?”
“No.”