"At least it is an honest trade," said she, looking him fixedly in the face.
The man turned pale while he received her bounty.
"It's not that, miss," he stammered. "It's not that--I only wanted to get a look of ye. I only wanted just to hear the turn of your voice again. No offence, miss, I'll go away now. O! can't ye give a chap a job? It's my heart's blood as I'd shed for you, free--and never ask no more nor a kind word in return!"
She looked him over from head to foot once more and passed on. In that look there was neither surprise, nor indignation, nor scorn, only a quaint and somewhat amused curiosity, yet this thief and associate of thieves quivered, as if it had been a sun-stroke. When she passed out of sight he bit the half-crown till it bent, and hid it away in his breast. "I'll never part with ye," said he, "never;" unmindful of poor Dorothea, going about her work tearful and forlorn. Gentleman Jim, uneducated, besotted, half-brutalised as he was, had yet drunk from the cup that poisons equally the basest and noblest of our kind. A well-dressed, good-looking young man, walking on the other side of the Square, did not fail to witness Tom Ryfe's farewell and Maud's interview with the crossing-sweeper. He too looked strangely disturbed, pacing up and down an adjoining street, more than once, before he could make up his mind to ring a well-known bell. Verily Miss Bruce seemed to be one of those ladies whose destiny it is to puzzle, worry, and interest every man with whom they come in contact.
CHAPTER VII
DICK STANMORE
She had certainly succeeded in puzzling Dick Stanmore and already began to interest him. The worry would surely follow in due time. Dick was a fine subject for the scalpel--good-humoured, generous, single-hearted, with faultless digestive powers, teeth, and colour to correspond, a strong tendency to active exercise, and such a faculty of enjoyment as, except in the highest order of intellects, seldom lasts a man over thirty.
Like many of his kind, he said he hated London, but lived there very contentedly from April to July, nevertheless. He was fresh, just at present, from a good scenting season in Leicestershire, followed by a sojourn on the Tweed, in which classical river he had improved many shining hours, wading waist-deep under a twenty-foot rod, any number of yards of line, and a fly of various hues, as gaudy, and but little smaller than a cock pheasant. Now he had been a week in town, during which period he met Miss Bruce at least once every day. This constant intercourse is to be explained in a few words.
Mrs. Stanmore, the Aunt Agatha with whom Maud expressed herself so unwilling to reside, was a sister of the late Mr. Bruce. She had married a widower with one son, that widower being old Mr. Stanmore, defunct, that son being Dick. Mrs. Stanmore, in the enjoyment of a large jointure (which rather impoverished her step-son), though arbitrary and unpleasant, was a woman of generous instincts, so offered Maud a home the moment she learned her niece's double bereavement; which home, for many reasons, heiress or no heiress, Miss Bruce felt constrained to accept. Thus it came about that she found herself walking with Tom Ryfe en cachette in the Square gardens; and, leaving them, recognised the gentleman whom she was to meet at luncheon in ten minutes, on whose intellect at least, if not his heart, she felt pretty sure she had already made an impression.