“Very likely.”
“It was very good of you to come and see that I was all right.”
“Oh, I was glad to come. I’m lonely too now. They’ve gone away, the others.”
“Your aunt, and your cousin? And left you all by yourself?”
“That wouldn’t be much of a hardship, if only one could manage to exist. But it is lonely, as you say. I shouldn’t mind it if the dog wouldn’t howl so. Sign of a death, they say; I shouldn’t be sorry if it were mine.”
“Your death! Oh, don’t say that. You didn’t seem at all miserable when I went to your house.”
“No. The fact is, you are at the bottom of my low spirits. It’s your uncanny spells that have done it, Miss Mulgrave. Witches always have little sticks like that.”
He took up her crutch almost reverently. It was leaning against the window-seat between them, for he had sat down beside her.
“What do you mean, Dick?”
It was only a consequence of her extreme ignorance of the world’s ways that she called him by the name by which she had heard others call him. But it came upon the young man as a startling and delicious surprise.