“Let me go and try if I can meet him,” said Oldroyd, jumping up. “Poachers wouldn’t touch him.”
“Yes, do, Mr Oldroyd. I will go with you,” cried Lucy, forgetting in her excitement that such a proposal was hardly etiquette. But neither mother nor daughter, in their anxiety, seemed to have the slightest idea of there being anything extraordinary at such a time.
“It won’t do,” Oldroyd had been saying to himself, “even if it should prove that I’m not a conceited ass to think such things, and she—bless her sweet, bright little face—ever willing to think anything of me, I should be a complete scoundrel to try and win her. Let me see, what did I make last year by my practice? Twenty-eight pounds fifteen, and nine pounds of it still owing, and likely to be owing, for I shall never get a sou. Then this year, what shall I take? Well, perhaps another five pounds on account of her brother’s illness. I must be mad.”
“Yes,” he said, after a pause, “I must be mad, and must have been worse to come down here to this out-of-the-way place, where there is not the most remote chance of my getting together a practice. No, it won’t do, I must play misogynist, and be as cold towards the bright little thing as if I were a monk.”
As these thoughts ran through his mind, others came to crowd them out—thoughts of a snug little home, made bright by a sweet face looking out from door or window to see him coming back after a long, tiring round. What was enough for one was enough for two—so people argued. That was right enough as regarded a house, but doubtful when it came to food, and absurd if you went as far as clothing.
“No, it would never do,” he said to himself, “I could not take her from her home to my poor, shabby place.”
But as he thought this he involuntarily looked round Mrs Alleyne’s dining-room, that lady being at the window, and he could not help thinking that, after all, his cottage-like home was infinitely preferable to this great, gaunt, dingy place, where anything suggestive of any comfort was out of the question.
“Yes, she would be more comfortable,” he muttered; “and—there, I’m going mad again. I will not think such things.”
Just then Lucy came in ready for starting, and all Philip Oldroyd’s good intentions might have been dressed for departure as well. Certainly, they all took flight, as he followed the eager little maiden into the hall.
“Pray—pray let me have news of him directly you find him, Mr Oldroyd,” cried Mrs Alleyne, piteously. “Run back yourself. You cannot tell what I suffer. Something must have happened.”