Mr. Duck edged his chair a little nearer to her. ‘Susan,’ he said, softly, ‘I shouldn’t have spoken so abruptly but for this. Oh, Susan, you need never want a home.’
Mrs. Turvey looked up through her tears and beheld the shining face of Messrs. Grigg and Limpet’s clerk so close to hers that it almost made her blink. At least that must have been the reason that she turned her head away.
Mr. Duck took her hand.
‘Susan,’ he said, pressing the imprisoned member gently against his shiny satin waistcoat, ‘don’t spurn me. You are alone in the world now, but I can offer you a shelter.
Come, weep on my bosom, my own stricken deer,
Though the world all turn from thee, thy shelter is here.
Those are lines, Susan, which I composed myself the first time I saw you, but which I dared not utter till now.’
The stricken deer sighed, but declined to weep upon the shiny bosom of her adorer.
‘It is very sudden,’ she faltered. ‘I—I really never thought there was anything——’
Jabez assured her there had always been a suspicion; that now it had ripened into a fact.