“Do you know her story, sir?”
“Yes.”
“Won’t you tell me?”
He hesitated.
“I don’t know why I shouldn’t,” he said. “It was told me by the London doctor, who knows her family, and he didn’t bind me to secrecy.”
Then he told me all about the poor young lady, and what had made her so ill.
It seems she had fallen in love with a handsome young gentleman, who had been staying for a long time at a boarding-house, where she and her mother were living.
He was quite a gentleman in every way, and as soon as he found they were falling in love with each other—as young people will do, in spite of all rules and regulations and etiquette, or whatever you call it—he asked the young lady if he might pay his addresses to her.
I think that’s the Society name for what we call “walking out and keeping company;” but I only go by what I’ve read in novels.
Well, Miss Elmore, who was an honest, straightforward, pure-minded young lady, with no fashionable nonsense about her, told the young gentleman that she loved him—of course, not straight out like that, but in a modest, ladylike way, and said that he must ask her mamma.