The eager, hungry little face grew a thought dim to Mr. Wycherly, it was so wistful and so wan. Instead of good-bye, he said, "God bless you, my child, God bless you," and went out of the room rather quickly.
Edmund's farewells were longer, and Mr. Wycherly waited patiently for him in the sunny street. He had gone out so quietly that Miss Morecraft never heard him.
She heard Edmund, though, and hastened to the door to speed the parting guest.
Jane-Anne, faint with rapture, lay crumpled up in her chair.
"He looked at me," she whispered, "he looked at me just like he looked at him that night when I peeped through the window—just every bit as kind.
"See-saw Margery Daw,
Jenny has got a new master."
CHAPTER VIII
JANE-ANNE ASSISTS PROVIDENCE
"To be sick is to enjoy monarchial
Prerogatives." Elia.
The doctor was Mrs. Methuen's doctor, and she had told him something of Mrs. Dew and his little patient; of how that worthy woman had given up place after place in the last five years that she might keep "an 'ome" for her orphaned niece; of how Jane-Anne was born in Athens and brought to London when she was a baby; of the modest, beautiful lady's maid, her mother, and the brilliant irresponsible young journalist, her father, so that he felt a kindly interest in his excitable little patient, and was sympathetically glad that "an 'ome" had been found for aunt and niece that seemed to promise rooted comfort and stability for both of them.