He followed her, and took the chair she offered.
It was a large, clean room, barely furnished with a table and four chairs, a corner cupboard, a cooking stove, a sewing machine, a chest of drawers, and a little white bed; but the neatness and cleanliness of the place could not have been surpassed.
“There is not much to tell,” he said. “My mother is old—quite old, for I was her youngest born, the child of her age. I am all that she has left. I fear that my long silence in the illness has made her painfully anxious, and I think the best and soonest way to alleviate that anxiety will be to go to her at once, instead of writing.”
“I think you are quite right. Indeed, you should never have left her.”
“I did not willingly, but ‘necessity knows no law.’”
“Ah! true, now long will you be gone?”
“Not over ten days.”
“And your room?”
“Please use it yourself, whenever you like to change the scene, and look out on the bay instead of the street,” said Harcourt with a smile.
“Thank you; I will.”