‘And how do you know Montressor?’ Susie asked.
‘Why, Susie, that is the man of last night!’
‘The man of last night! the man whose child—— And you gave him that other name? Oh!’ She gave a little fluttering cry, then paused, with a look of consternation growing upon her face. She stopped short for a moment in the streets in the extremity of her perplexed and troubled sensations. Then she caught John’s arm again with a close pressure. ‘Don’t see that man any more. Oh, promise me not to see that man any more.’
‘Why?’ said John. ‘He is not perhaps so well-known as he thinks, but he is a good fellow enough, and knows a lot. He is very kind. You should see him with his little girl; and then he was so kind to me.’
‘Oh, John, oh, John!’ Susie cried. It had all been so pleasant when they had set out, when nothing but the ordinary incidents of living had to be taken into account. But now they had struck upon more difficult ground.
CHAPTER VI.
BEGINNING LIFE.
That day John’s future career was determined summarily, without any further consultation of his wishes.
It was the career he had himself chosen, the very same career about which there had been so many consultations at home in the old times. This was how he described to himself a period so very little withdrawn from the present moment. At home—he had no home now, nor even a shadow of one. It was the profession he had chosen; Elly’s trade; the one they had fixed upon in their youthful fervour as the best for the advantage of the race, as well as for the worthy work and fit advancement of the young workman, who, in his way, was still to be a Christian knight. To make lighthouses and harbours for the safety of travellers at sea, and roads and bridges for the advantage of those at home—that was how the boy and girl had regarded it, or rather the girl and boy; for John had taken the matter from the beginning more soberly than Elly, taking satisfaction in the idea of learning surveying and all the other necessary preliminaries, even mathematics, at which he had always been so much the best. But when he was called to another interview in his mother’s room at the hospital, and with her pen in her hand, suspended in the midst of the reports she was writing, or the accounts she was making up, Mrs. Sandford had given him the letter which he was to take to a certain address, and so begin work at once, John’s heart rose within him in resistance and indignation.
‘I have settled everything,’ his mother said. ‘You will have nothing to do but to send up your name and this note. Well, it is what I understood you had set your heart upon; isn’t it so? You want to be an engineer. So my father said.’