"You shall stay with me as long as you please, and tell me all your story, Miss Gillespie. I have done nothing to deserve the interest I see you feel in me; but I thank you for it."
Her visitor did not immediately reply: she sat looking at Georgie's face, more beautiful in its expression of grief and courage than when it was at its brightest, as though she were learning the features by heart. Lady Mitford blushed a little under the scrutiny, and smiled, as she said:
"You look at me very earnestly, Miss Gillespie. What is there in my face to fix your attention?"
"There is everything that I once did not believe in, while I longed to see it. There is beauty, Lady Mitford--well, I have seen enough of that; but there is truth and gentleness, sweet self-forgetfulness, and an impulse of kindness to everything that lives and feels and can suffer. The first time I saw that face I thought of the common saying about the face of an angel; but I soon ceased to think it was like that. Angels are in heaven, where their sinless and sorrowless sphere lies. Such women as you are on earth, to teach those who, standing far off, see them, to hope, and believe, and take comfort, because they exist and have their part in the same troubled world with themselves, but always bringing the image and the ideal of a better nearer, and making it real."
Her voice trembled, and tears stood in her eyes. Georgie wondered more and more.
"When I have told you my story, Lady Mitford," she went on, "you will be able to understand in a degree--you never could quite comprehend it--the effect that such a woman as you produces upon such a woman as I; for I studied you more closely than you could have suspected in that brief time at Redmoor; and I hold a clue to your history, of whose existence you were ignorant."
"Do not tell me anything that it will pain you to repeat, Miss Gillespie," said Georgie, seeing that she hesitated and changed colour.
"In that case I should tell you nothing, Lady Mitford; for there is little in my life that has not been painful. I daresay you would find it difficult to realize, if I could put it before you in the plainest words; and I am sure, even if you did realize it, you would judge it mercifully--you would remember the difficulties and the dangers of such an existence, and suffer them to have their weight as against its sins and sorrows. You know what it is to be motherless, Lady Mitford; but yours was a guarded childhood, hedged about with pious care and fatherly love,--they told me all about you down at Redmoor. Mine was a motherless childhood; and my father was a thief, and the companion of thieves. This is the simple English of the matter. You would not understand the refinements and distinctions by which the dishonest classes describe their different ranks in the army of thieves; you could not comprehend the scenes and the influences among which my childhood was passed; and I will not try to explain them, because they have no bearing upon what it concerns you to hear."
She had rested her arm upon a table beside her chair, and supported her head on her hand.
"My wretched childhood had passed by, and my more wretched girlhood had reached its prime, when I was brought in contact with Sir Charles Mitford."