“Poor things!” says the wife; “but are you sure the mother was a lady?”
“A clergyman’s widow,” says Luke hastily; “there isn’t a doubt about it. Poor girl! and they’ve got to learn to use it before it will be of any use.”
“Poor girl, Luke?” says the wife softly; and I saw through my eyelashes that she laid a hand upon his arm, and was looking curiously at him, when if he didn’t cover his face with his hands, rest his elbows on the table, and give a low groan! Then the old woman got up, stood behind his chair, and began playing with and caressing his hair like the foolish old mother would.
“Mother,” he says suddenly, “will you go and see them?”
She didn’t answer for a minute, only stood looking down at him, and then said softly—
“They paid you the first money?”
“No,” he says hotly. “I hadn’t the heart to take it.”
“Then that money you paid was yours, Luke?”
“Yes, mother,” he says simply; and those two stopped looking one at the another, till the wife bent down and kissed him, holding his head afterwards, for a few moments, between her hands; for she always did worship that chap, our only one; and then I closed my eyes tight, and went on breathing heavy and thinking.
For something like a new revelation had come upon me. I knew Luke was five-and-twenty, and that I was fifty-four, but he always seemed like a boy to me, and here was I waking up to the fact that he was a grown man, and that he was thinking and feeling as I first thought and felt when I saw his mother, nigh upon eight-and-twenty years ago.