"A fancy, perhaps. What should he hide from you?"
"I cannot tell; it may be fancy, but it—it worries me to think of. Oh! Mattie, you'll forget him, if that trouble—should come to him! You'll forget—all this—and turn to that new father of yours! And I had hope in you."
"Hope in me ever. I will not betray your trust in me. Before all—myself, father, friends—your son!"
"Mattie!"
The father looked with a new surprise at our heroine. He had grown very weak, but her hasty, impetuous voice, seemed for an instant to give new life unto him.
"Hush! don't betray me. Never to living soul before have I dared to tell, to breathe this! God forgive me, if I have failed to break away from all my folly, and have thought of him too much, as I, a stray from the streets, had never a right to think of one so well-born, honourable, and true. You forgive me—you, his father?"
"Yes."
"You know all now. How, without one ambitious thought of linking his name with mine, I will love him ever, and be ever, if he need it, his true friend, and sister. I will die for him, when the time comes, and the secret will die with me, and not shame us both. Judge me, if I am likely to forget him, sir."
"No—no—I see all now."
"Don't mistake me; don't think at the last that I would scheme for him, or ever marry him, to disgrace a family like yours. Don't think anything but that I love Harriet Wesden, also, before myself, but not before him, though I have tried so hard to live him down! and that I will do my best—always my very best—to bring about the happiness of both of them!"