"I know the feeling, Mrs. Mervyn; I've had it myself, when duns were troublesome. But you have nothing of the kind in this happy retreat; which I really do envy you from my heart."
"Envy! Ah, sir—happy retreat! Little you know, sir. I have been for weeks and months at a time half wild with anguish, dreaming of the sea. How can he know?"
"Very true, I can't know; I only speak of it as it strikes me at the moment. I fancy I should so like to live here, like a hermit, quite out of the persecutions of luck and the nonsense of the world."
"You are wonderfully like at times, sir—it is beautiful, it is frightful—when I moved the candle then——"
"I'll sit any way you like best, Mrs. Mervyn, with pleasure, and you can move the candle, and try; if it amuses—no, I mean interests you."
If some of his town friends could have peeped in through a keyhole, and seen Tom Sedley and old Rebecca Mervyn seated at opposite sides of the table, in this very queer old room, so like Darby and Joan, it would have made matter for a comical story.
"Like a flash it comes!"
Tom Sedley looked at the wild, large eyes that were watching him—the round spectacles now removed—across the table, and could not help smiling.
"Yes, the smile—it is the smile! You told me, sir, your name was Sedley, not Verney."
"My name is Thomas Sedley. My father was Captain Sedley, and served through a part of the Peninsular campaign. He was not twenty at the battle of Vittoria, and he was at Waterloo. My mother died a few months after I was born."