“Go by all means, and learn what you can, Johnny. Go at once. I don’t think you need, any of you, be afraid, though,” she added, laughing. “I have seen very much of boy-and-girl love; seen that it rarely comes to anything. Young men mostly go through one or two such episodes before settling seriously to the business of life.”
The omnibus took me to Oxford Street, and I found my way from thence to Torriana Square. It proved to be a corner house, its front entrance being in the square. But there was a smaller entrance on the side (which was rather a bustling street), and a sort of office window, on the wire blind of which was written, in white letters, “Mr. Smith, wine-merchant.”
A wine-merchant! Well, I was surprised. Could there be any mistake? No, it was the right number. But I thought there must be, and stood staring at the place with both eyes. That was a come-down. Not but that wine-merchants are as good as other people; only Sophie Chalk had somehow imparted the notion of their living up to lords and ladies.
I asked at the front-door for Mrs. Smith, and was shown upstairs to a handsome drawing-room. A little girl, with a sallow face, thin and sickly, was seated there. She did not get up, only stared at me with her dark, keen, deep-set eyes.
“Do you know where your mamma is, Miss Trot?” asked the servant, putting a chair.
“You can go and search for her?”
She looked at me so intently as the maid left the room, that I told her who I was, and what I had come for. The child’s tongue—it seemed as sharp a one as Miss Cattledon’s—was let loose.
“I have heard of you, Johnny Ludlow. Mrs. Smith would be glad to see you. You had better wait.”
I don’t know how it is that I make myself at home with people; or, rather, that people seem so soon to be at home with me. I don’t try to do it, but it is always so. In two or three minutes, when the girl was talking to me as freely as though I were her brother, the maid came back again.
“Miss Trot, I cannot find your mamma.”