He was very, very careful over his prayers; he was, in truth, a sincerely religious man, he always went up to his room half an hour before bedtime, and there shut the door and fell on his knees before his Maker. He devoted this special time to praying for those people to whom he did special, marked, and individual good—the little boy in the hospital, the girl who was to pass a very important examination at Newnham, &c. All these he brought individually, as he expressed it, “before the throne of grace.” But one night lately, he didn’t know why, he had been forced, as it were, to ask Almighty God to turn Kitty Merrydew from the error of her ways. He had hated Kitty Merrydew from the moment he had discovered that she had stolen his money, but now he remembered that he had prayed for her.
Kitty watched him intently. She was trying with all her might and main to read into his deep and great nature. She, with her shallowness and cunning, could no more understand a man like Dodd than she could fly; but she possessed, in her own way, a great deal of genius. Suddenly she saw that she had done the great, the only thing by coming to speak to him individually and alone.
She spoke hurriedly.
“It is Christmas-time, and I am miserable.”
Still no reply of any sort from the man.
“Perhaps you don’t know, but in the summer I was tempted. You are so rich, you can’t tell what it means to be awfully poor, poor as I am, with an auntie who has to live in a little attic. And just because I am at The Red Gables School people think I am rich, and I did want two pounds. I will tell you. I know, perhaps, you will—send me to—prison; but I had borrowed it from a girl, and she—she wanted it back, and I hadn’t it for her, and she threatened to write to Mrs. Fleming, and Mrs. Fleming would have sent me from the school, and I’d have lost all my chance. I was writing to her, begging of her not to do it. Although I looked so happy, for you were all so sweet to me, I—was—not. I found I wanted an envelope, and I came here to get one, and there was a—lot of—money on the table, a great pile; and—oh, oh Mr. Dodd!—I took two sovereigns. I did! I have been so unhappy ever since; perhaps you saw how red I got when you came into the room. Oh Mr. Dodd, I have brought it back—here it is—the money I took. I won’t be so unhappy now I’ve paid you back. Oh I was a—thief! I suppose you’ll tell Mrs. Fleming. There, that’s all.”
Kitty laid the money on the table, and she looked up at him in the most beseeching way. As he was still silent, not glancing at the money, but with his hard face gazing at hers, she repeated her remark: “Of course you’ll tell her.”
Then at last he spoke. “Wench, if I’d meant to tell her I’d have done it before now.”
“What!” said Kitty, with a start, “did you know it?”
Dodd laughed. “Do you suppose, my wench,” he said, “that I’d be living in this house—I, who was once a poor boy, a boy who often was hungry for his breakfast—and yet that two pounds could be taken from me without my missing them? That isn’t the way men get rich, lass; that isn’t the way men get rich.”