“And yet shrinks, as it were, from himself, that he dare not be alone!”
“Why, ’atween you and I, there’s Tyburn written upon his face.”
“What upon his face?”
“Tyburn.”
“What’s that?”
“Why—why—you don’t mean all to go to say as you never heard o’ Tyburn?”
“I have lived a lone and solitary life,” said Ada; “and, although so near the haunts of thousands of my fellow-creatures, I have seen but one, except rarely. The names of places in this great city, the habits, the thoughts, and actions of its myriads of inhabitants, are all strange to me. For all I know of the familiar things of life—those every-day events and materials of life that make up the sum of most persons’ existence—I am as ignorant as a child cast upon some desert shore.”
There was a mournful pathos in the tone of voice in which Ada uttered these words that gave them their full effect upon the rough man she was with. Nature spoke in every soft melancholy word that fell from her lips; and, although her language was to him as strange and incomprehensible quite, as his to her, he understood sufficient to reply to her.—
“Then, whosoever shut you up, and purvented you from going about and amusing yourself, my dear, was a big brute, and only let him come across me, that’s all.”
“Whose house is this?” said Ada, listening, at the same time, to a beautiful melody which was being played as a prelude to the commencement of a dance.