Richard Watts took up the story, and told it again enthusiastically.
“I was going to see if there was anything left to eat in this city of half-bricks except pâté de foie gras, child. If you hadn’t cried out, I’d never have seen you, for I’m as blind as a bat. Then I heard your voice, and looked up. ‘It’s the little passenger, by gad,’ I said. The rest concerned the Frenchman. He was insulting you, eh? Listen to that, Anne Brown; he insulted her. He asked for her answer. I gave it him, old girl—he is reading it now. And lucky I thought of her name. They would have torn us to pieces, the pair of us. But I remembered. Trust old Dick Watts, who has the devil of a memory for names. He remembered. ‘It’s old Hélène’s daughter,’ he said. And they stood by us—gad’s truth, they stood by us.”
He helped himself to a glass of wine, and drank it at a gulp. Beatrix, still hot and flushed, and scarce knowing what she did, rose and thanked him once more.
“I can never be grateful enough,” she said; “and I must not intrude upon you.”
Richard Watts laughed heartily.
“Intrude—listen to that, Anne Brown; the little passenger intrudes.”
“’Twould be a poor house where you could intrude, miss,” said the old housekeeper decisively. “Let the master send a word to your home, and tell your friends what has happened. We are not going to part with you yet. You’re in no fit state to walk anywhere, I’m sure, and as for carriages, God bless me, how many days is it since I saw one in this street?”
Beatrix answered them in a low voice.
“I have no friends,” she said; “there is no one to be anxious about me. It is something else—I cannot tell you—I wish to God I could.”
A great sense of loneliness and of her own terrible day overcame her, and she sank into one of the chairs by the table and burst into a flood of passionate weeping. That which no Frenchman in Strasburg could wring from her was to be told in this room, where English friends watched her with tears in their eyes, and everything recalled the home she had lost and the faces in that England she would look upon no more.