He stood, with her hand clasped in his, looking at her intently.
"You will not be sorry for this hereafter," he said at last. "When the evil day comes to you which must come to all, you may be glad to remember the words you have spoken this minute. Thank you very, very much. No," he added, in answer to a request that he would return to Wood Cottage; "I have had pleasant tidings spoken to me, and I will leave with their sound in my ears. Good-bye. When you say your prayers to-night do not forget to remember me."
CHAPTER IX.
THE NEW YELLOW.
All that night, after saying her prayers—in which she remembered Mr. Werner and his wife, and all other people who were in sore distress—Mrs. Mortomley lay awake, a strange sense of trouble oppressing her.
It was like the old bad times come back again; it was a return of the later evil days at Homewood, to lie in the semi-darkness of the summer night and think of Mr. Werner ruined, Mr. Werner beggared.
How would his wife bear it? Dolly knew her friend pretty well, yet she could not answer this question to her own satisfaction. Mrs. Werner was a noble, generous-hearted, unselfish woman, and yet Dolly comprehended in some vague, instinctive sort of way that wealth and position and social consideration were very dear to this fresh bankrupt's wife.
There are some people who do not much care whether they walk or drive through the world's thoroughfares; indeed, there are those who, given the choice, would prefer to walk. Now Mrs. Werner's mind was not so ill-regulated an one as all this comes to. Most emphatically she liked her carriages and horses and servants, and all the luxuries money can purchase. She had married for these things, as Mrs. Mortomley understood perfectly, and Dolly did not think—no, she did not, that Leonora would be satisfied to relinquish them.
Further, Mr. Werner had always set himself up as such a model of business capacity and business prudence, that he really had no right to fall into difficulties; certainly not to continue to flounder through difficulties as, according to his own confession, had been the case for years.