The young man was a little confused. He was very diffident, and such lack of conventionality on the part of a perfect stranger surprised him.
"It is unusual," he admitted.
"It is a thing which I have never seen," she went on, dropping voice a little and glancing towards a bath-chair close at hand, in which an elderly and very delicate-looking old gentleman was muffled up in furs and apparently asleep. "It is something, even, for which I had not dared to hope. We seem so far here from everything that is bright and beautiful and cheerful."
Aaron Rodd, who was a shy and awkward being, felt unexpectedly at his ease. He was even anxious for further conversation. He had a rather long, pale face, with deep-set eyes and rugged features. He was soberly, even sombrely dressed in dismal black. He had the air of a recluse. Perhaps that was why the young lady smiled upon him with such confidence.
"You are not English?" he ventured.
She shook her head.
"What we are now, alas!" she sighed, glancing towards the bath-chair, "I scarcely know, for we have no country. Like every one else in such a plight, we come to England."
"It is your father who sleeps there?" he enquired.
"It is my grandfather," she told him. "Together—he and I and my brother—we have passed through terrible times. He has lost all power to sleep at night. In the daytime, when it does not rain, he is wheeled out here, and, if it is only not too cold, then he sleeps as he does now, and I watch."
"You are very young to have charge of him."