They stood looking very kindly at each other, the old woman and the young man, and then she said suddenly, as he took up his hat and stick:
"I don't know why I told you, except, perhaps, that it happened, the burning of 'Hannah,' I mean, thirty-five years ago to-day. I was thinking about it before you came."
As he hurried through the rain towards the 'bus, the young man counted back.
"That makes her fifty-two," he said. "I thought she was older than that."
As he squeezed into the crowded interior of "everybody's carriage," as de Amicis calls it, a feeling of great pity swept over him. "How it must have hurt," he thought, "for her to remember it like that."
[CHAPTER IX]
The Gaskell-Walkers returned from their very long honeymoon a few days later and spent the night at Happy House, their own house being not quite ready for them.