"Nonsense, Anna. I shall keep you out here pacing the heath until you do tell, though it be until morning, which would certainly send Mrs. Copp into a fit."
Not very awkwardly when she had fairly entered upon it, Anna told her tale--her sense of the unfitness, nay, the impossibility of the union--of the wide social gulf that lay between them. Isaac met the communication with a laugh.
"Is that all! It is my turn now not to understand. You have been reared a gentlewoman, Anna."
"Papa was a clergyman. I have been reared, I think, to nothing but work. We were so very poor. My home--ah! if you could see, if you could imagine the contrast it presented to this of yours! As I sat in your drawing-room to-night I could not help feeling the difference forcibly."
If Isaac Thornycroft had not seen what she spoke of, he had seen something else--that never in his whole life had he met any one who gave him so entirely the idea of a gentlewoman--a refined, well-bred gentlewoman--as this girl now speaking with him, Anna Chester. He continued in evident amusement.
"Let us see how your objections can be refuted. You play and sing?"
"A little."
"You draw?"
"A little."
"You can dance?"