"Don't tell grannie anything about it yet," said Lucy. "She's much quieter in her mind now, and if we were to set her off again it would only do her harm. Any thing certain she has a right to know, but I don't think she has a right to know all that you are trying to do for her. That is your business. But you mustn't mind how she behaves to you, Tom dear. She thinks you and your father all one in the affair."
When the old lady entered she saw at a glance how things were going; but she merely gave a very marked sniff, and retreated to her chair by the window. She first seated herself, and then proceeded to take off her bonnet and shawl. But she could not keep silent long, and the beginning of speech as well as of strife is like the letting out of water.
"Thomas," she said—for people of her degree of education became more familiar in their address when they are angry—"is this room mine or yours?"
"Grannie," said Lucy, "Thomas has nothing to do with it. He was away from home, I assure you, when—when—things went wrong."
"Very convenient, no doubt, for both of you! It's nothing to you, so long as you marry him, of course. But you might have waited. The money would have been yours. But you'll have it all the sooner for marrying the man that turned your grandmother into the street. Well, well! Only I won't sit here and see that scoundrel in my room."
She rose as she spoke, though what she would or could have done she did not know herself. It was on Lucy's lips to say to her—"The room's mine, grannie, if you come to that, and I won't have my friend turned out of it." But she thought better of it, and taking Thomas's hand, led him into the shop. Thereupon grannie turned to Widdles for refuge, not from the pain of Thomas's presence, but from the shame of her own behavior, took him out of his cage, and handled him so roughly that one of the three wing feathers left on one side came off in her hand. The half of our ill-temper is often occasioned by annoyance at the other half.
Thomas and Lucy finished their talk in a low voice, hidden in the leafy forest of books. Thomas told her all about it now; how he wanted to find the man Jack Stevens, and how Robins and he had followed him to Lisbon, and found him there and brought him home; how he had had to part with her ring as well as his own watch for money to start them in their search, and how even then they had had to work their passage to Lisbon and back. But if the representation she and Mr. Fuller had given him of the state of the case was correct, he said, there could be no doubt but Jack's testimony would reverse the previous decision, and grannie would have her own.
"I can't help being rather sorry for it," concluded Tom; "for it'll come to you then, Lucy, I suppose, and you will hardly be able to believe that it was not for my own sake that I went after Jack Stevens. I've got him safe, and Robins too, at the Mermaid. But I can't be grand and give you up. If you were as rich as Miss Coutts, I couldn't give you up—though I should like to, almost, when I think of the money and my father."
"Don't give me up, Tom, or I'll give you up, and that would be a bad job for me."