“I like it, Gladys. I am old, in many things, for my years, but a boy still in love, and you must teach me how to be worthy of all you give so generously and sweetly.”
“Do I give the most?”
“All women do, they say. But go on, and tell the rest of this fine plan of yours. While I use my polyglot accomplishments, what becomes of you?” he asked, hastily returning to the safer subject; for the wistful look in her eyes smote him to the heart.
“I work also. You are still Mr. Helwyze’s homme d’affaires, as he calls you; I am still his reader. But when he does not need me, I shall take up my old craft again, and embroider, as I used at home. You do not know how skilful I am with the needle, and never dreamed that the initials on the handkerchiefs you admired so much were all my work. Oh, I am a thrifty wife, though such a little one!” and Gladys broke into her clear child’s laugh, which seemed to cheer them both, as a lark’s song makes music even in a cloud.
Canaris laughed with her; for these glimpses of practical gifts and shrewd common sense in Gladys were very like the discovery of a rock under its veil of moss, or garland of airy columbines.
“But what will he say to all this?” asked the young man, with a downward gesture of the finger, and in his eye a glimmer of malicious satisfaction at the thought of having at least one secret in which Helwyze had no part.
“We need not tell him. It is nothing to him what we do up here. Let him find out, if he cares to know,” answered Gladys, with a charmingly mutinous air, as she tripped away to her own little room.
“He will care, and he will find out. He has no right; but that will not stop him,” returned Canaris, following to lean in the door-way, and watch her kneeling before a great basket, from which she pulled reels of gay silk, unfinished bits of work, and fragments of old lace.
“See!” she said, holding up one of the latter, “I can both make and mend; and one who is clever at this sort of thing can earn a pretty penny in a quiet way. Through my old employer I can get all the work I want; so please do not forbid it, Felix: I should be so much happier, if I might?”
“I will forbid nothing that makes you happy. But Helwyze will be exceeding wroth when he discovers it, unless the absurdity of beggars living in a palace strikes him as it does me.”