"Yes—no," Grey replied, confusedly, scarcely willing to commit himself again to the asthma. "I shall not mind the cold at all. I am accustomed to it. You must remember I come from the land of ice and snow. You have no idea what blizzards America is capable of getting up, and ought to hear how the wind can howl and the snow drift about an old farm-house in a rocky pasture land, which I would give much to see to-night."
There was a tone of regret in his rich, musical voice, and forgetting that Neil had said he was from Boston. Bessie said to him:
"Is that farm-house your home?"
"Oh, no; my home proper is in Boston," he answered her, "but I have spent some of my happiest days in that house, and the memory of it and the dear woman who lives there is the sweetest of my life, and the saddest, too," he added, slowly; for, right in Bessie's blue eyes, looking at him so steadily, he seemed to see the hidden grave, and for a moment all the old bitter shame and humiliation which had once weighed him down so heavily, and which, naturally, the lapse of years had tended to lighten, came back to him in the presence of this young girl who seemed so inextricably mixed up with everything pertaining to his past.
It was like some new place which we sometimes come suddenly upon, with a strange feeling that we have seen it before, though when we cannot tell; so Bessie impressed Grey as a part of the tragedy enacted in the old New England house many, many years ago, and covered up so long. He almost felt that she had been there with him and that now she was standing by the hidden grave and stretching her hand to him across it with an offer of help and sympathy. And so strong was this impression that he actually lifted his right hand an instant to take in it the slender one resting on the mantel, as Bessie talked to him.
"What would she say if she knew?" he thought, feeling that it would be easy to tell her about it,—feeling that she was one to trust even unto death.
Bessie was interested in Grey, and already felt the wonderful mesmeric influence he exercised over all who came in contact with him. In the salons of fashion, in the halls of Eaton and Oxford, in the railway car, or in the privacy of domestic life, Grey's presence was an all-pervading power, or as an old woman whom he had once befriended expressed it:
"He was like a great warm stove in a cold room."
And Bessie felt the warmth, and was glad he was there, and said to him:
"I wish you would tell me about that house among the rocks and the woman who lives there, I am sure I should like her, and I know so little of America or the American people. You are almost the first I have ever seen."