“I have a story of my own to tell you,” she said hastily, “in which I shall have to crave a great deal of forbearance on your part, James, and pardon for what I have taken upon myself to do, or rather to consent to. I thought of asking your permission first, but then I felt that anything of this kind might seem a want of confidence in you.”
His face had changed in a moment to the widest of smiles, and brightest of aspects. “Fancy!” he said, “anything for which you should have to ask my permission, any wish of yours that it would not be my highest pleasure to do.”
“Thank you,” she said, “dear. I felt sure you would back me up: and now I have got this pretty speech to the boot, to make me happy. James, do you remember a story I told you when you first spoke to me, when you asked me first, in Helen Stanhope’s house?”
“About?”—He paused and added, “Yes: you have seen him again?”
“I have seen a man paralysed, in a Bath chair, moved, dressed, fed, ordered about by a servant. The ghost, or far worse than the ghost, the wreck of a man.”
“And that was he?” A certain gleam—was it of satisfaction?—was for a moment in James Rowland’s eyes. But it was only for a moment, and the next they were subdued by the most genuine sympathy. “My poor dear!” he said.
“It was a great shock to see him, you may suppose: but that is a small matter. He has two children, like ourselves.”
The light sprang up in his eyes, and he thanked her with a sudden kiss upon her hand.
“A boy and a girl, about the same ages. The girl I have seen—a strange specimen to me of a new generation I have no knowledge of; the boy, I fear, a very careless boy. Of all things in the world it has occurred to Mr. Saumarez, of all people in the world, to desire to confide these children to me.”
“It shows that he has more sense than I could have thought.”