"I am on my way there now," resumed the schoolmaster. "They allowed me the stagecoach hire—outside stage-coach hire all the way. Bless you, they grudge me nothing. But as the time at which I am expected there left me ample leisure, I determined to walk instead. How glad I am to think I did so!"
"How glad should we be!"
"Yes, yes," said the schoolmaster, moving restlessly in his chair, "certainly, that's very true. But you—where are you going, where are you coming from, what have you been doing since you left me, what had you been doing before? Now, tell me—do tell me. I know very little of the world, and perhaps you are better fitted to advise me in its affairs than I am qualified to give advice to you; but I am very sincere, and I have a reason (you have not forgotten it) for loving you. I have felt since that time as if my love for him who died had been transferred to you."
Nell was moved in her turn by this allusion to the favorite pupil who had died, and by the plain, frank kindness of the good schoolmaster. She told him all—that they had no friend or relative—that she had fled with the old man to save him from all the miseries he dreaded—that she was flying now to save him from himself—and that she sought an asylum in some quiet place, where the temptation before which he fell would never enter, and her late sorrows and distresses could have no place.
The schoolmaster heard her with astonishment. "This child!" he thought; "she is one of the heroines and saints of earth!"
Then he told her of a great idea which had occurred to him. They were all three to travel together to the village where his new school was located, and he made no doubt he could find them some simple and congenial employment.
The child joyfully accepted this; and the journey was made very comfortably in a stage which went that way. Stowed among the softer bundles and packages she thought this to be a drowsy, luxurious way of going, indeed.
At last they came upon a quiet, restful-looking hamlet clustered in a valley among some stately trees.
"See—here's the church!" cried the delighted schoolmaster, in a low voice; "and that old building close beside it is the schoolhouse, I'll be sworn. Five-and-thirty pounds a year in this beautiful place!"
They admired everything—the old gray porch, the green churchyard, the ancient tower, the very weathercock; the brown thatched roofs of cottage, barn, and homestead, peeping from among the trees; the stream that rippled by the distant watermill; the blue Welsh mountains far away. It was for such a spot the child had wearied in the dense, dark, miserable haunts of labor. Upon her bed of ashes, and amidst the squalid horrors through which they had forced their way, visions of such scenes—beautiful indeed, but not more beautiful than this sweet reality—had been always present to her mind. They had seemed to melt into a dim and airy distance, as the prospect of ever beholding them again grew fainter; but, as they receded, she had loved and panted for them more.