“I have talked so much about you, and she has seemed so interested in all you do.”
“You foolish fellow,” he said, with his face resuming its old calm. “You are too young yet to thoroughly understand such matters. When you grow older, you will learn why it was that I could not play, as you seemed to wish, so mean a part as to become John Lister’s accuser. It would have been contemptible in the extreme.”
“I could not help feeling that Miss Carr ought to know, Hallett.”
“Yes, my lad, but you shrank from telling her yourself.”
He was silent for a minute.
“Ah, Antony,” he said, “Fate seems to have ordained that I am always to wear the workman’s coat; but I console myself with the idea that a man may be a poor artisan and still at heart a gentleman.”
“Of course!”
“My father was a thoroughly honourable man, who left us poor solely from misfortune. The legacy he left to me, Antony, was the care of my dear mother and Linny.”
He looked down tenderly on the sleeping girl, and softly stroked her hair; the touch, light as it was, waking her, to smile in his face with a look very different from that worn by her countenance the day before.