“Oh, miss, have you heard the verdict?” said the servant, who knew Cecil slightly, and was eager for sympathy. “And what’s to become of my little ones no one seems to know.”
“That is just what we came to inquire about,” said Mr. Boniface, “We heard there were no relations to take charge of them. Is that true?”
“There’s not a creature in the world to care for them, sir,” said the nurse. “There’s the lawyer looking through master’s papers now, sir, and he says we must be out of this by next week, and that he must look up some sort of school where they’ll take them cheap. A school for them little bits of things, sir, isn’t it enough to break one’s heart? And little Miss Gwen so delicate, and only a lawyer to choose it, one as knows nothing but about parchments and red tape, sir, and hasn’t so much as handled a child in his life, I’ll be bound.”
“If Mr. Grantley’s solicitor is here I should like to speak to him for a minute,” said Mr. Boniface. “I’ll be with you again before long, Cecil; perhaps you could see the children.”
He was shown into the study which had belonged to the master of the house, and unfolded Cecil’s suggestion to the lawyer, who proved to be a much more fatherly sort of man than the nurse had represented. He was quite certain that his client would be only too grateful for so friendly an act.
“Things have gone hardly with poor Grantley,” he remarked. “And such an offer will be the greatest possible surprise to him. The poor fellow has not had a fair chance; handicapped with such a wife, one can almost forgive him for going to the bad. I shall be seeing him once more to-morrow, and will let you know what he says. But of course there can be but one answer—he will thankfully accept your help.”
Meanwhile Cecil had been taken upstairs to the nursery; it looked a trifle less desolate than the rest of the house, yet lying on the table among the children’s toys she saw an evening paper with the account of the verdict and sentence on John Grantley.
The nurse had gone into the adjoining room, but she quickly returned.
“They are asleep, miss, but you’ll come in and see them, wont you?”
Cecil had wished for this, and followed her guide into the dimly lighted night nursery, where in two little cribs lay her future charges. They were beautiful children, and as she watched them in their untroubled sleep and thought of the mother who had deserted them and disgraced her name, and the father who was that moment beginning his five years of penal servitude, her heart ached for the little ones, and more and more she longed to help them.