"I've had a message that calls me away," he said. "If you can spare me for an hour——"
"I'll mak' out," said the engineer.
The lad at the gate looked up with an encouraging grin when he saw his charge returning.
"I'd loike to mak' th' shillin'," he said.
Murdoch followed him in silence. He was thinking of what was going to happen to himself scarcely as much as of the dead man in whose name he was called upon. He was brought near to him again as if it were by a fate. "If you are Stephen Murdoch's son," had moved him strongly.
Their destination was soon reached. It was a house in a narrow but respectable street occupied chiefly by a decent class of workmen and their families. A week before he had seen in the window of this same house a card bearing the legend "Lodgings to Let," and now it was gone. A clean, motherly woman opened the door for them.
"Tha'st earnt thy shillin', has tha, tha young nowt?" she said to the lad, with friendly severity. "Coom in, Mester. I wur feart he'd get off on some of his marocks an' forget aw about th' paper. She's i' a bad way, poor lady, an' th' lass is na o' mich use. Coom up-stairs."
She led the way to the second floor, and her knock being answered by a voice inside, she opened the door. The room was comfortable and of good size, a fire burned on the grate, and before it sat a girl with her hands clasped upon her knee.
She was a girl of nineteen, dark of face and slight of figure to thinness. When she turned her head slowly to look at him, Murdoch was struck at once with the peculiar steadiness of her large black eyes.