“Well, mother, among the many adventures I have been through I must tell you the one connected with this young lady.”
He then told her of his first meeting, of his stay at her father’s house, and of the hurricane which they experienced together.
“Well, mother, I met her again unexpectedly more than two and a half years ago in London. Her father had come over here to live, and has a fine house at Dulwich. I have just been staying there for a week, and I have some hope that when I ask her she will consent to be my wife.”
“Of course she will,” the old woman said quite indignantly. “How could she do otherwise? Why, if you were to ask the king’s daughter I am sure she would take you. Here you are, one of the king’s captains, have done all sorts of wonderful things, and have beaten his enemies all over the world, and you are as straight and good-looking a young gentleman as anyone wants to see. No one, who was not out of her mind, could think of saying ‘No’ to you.”
“Ah, mother, you are prejudiced! To you I am a sort of swan that has come out of a duck’s egg.”
They chatted for some time, and then Will said:
“Are you quite sure, John, that the bundle the clergyman handed over to me contained every single thing my father left behind him?”
“Well, now I think of it, Will, there is something else. I never remembered it at the time, but when my old woman was sweeping a cobweb off the rafters the other day she said: ‘Why, here is Will’s father’s fiddle’, and, sure enough, there it was. It had been up there from the day you came into the house, and if we noticed it none of us ever gave it a thought.”
“I remember it now,” Will exclaimed. “When I was a young boy I used to think I should like to learn to play on it, and I spoke to Miss Warden about it. But she said I had better stick to my lessons, and then as I grew up I could learn it if I still had a fancy to do so.”
He got on to a chair, and took it from the rafter on which it had so long lain. Then he carefully wiped the dust off it.