‘Yes—everything,’ said John, with a smile and a sigh.

‘And about these—men? If so be as she knows—and you’ll promise to see them no more——’

‘I can’t give any promise,’ said John, shaking his head. But he looked her in the face, in a way, Mrs. Short thought, that those who are falling into bad company and evil ways never do. He was not afraid to meet her eye. She shook her head standing over him, feeling that the problem was one which it was above her power to solve. She said at last, in a subdued tone:

‘If you’ve told your ma—she wouldn’t countenance what was wrong. Oh, Lord, I wish I knew what to do for the best. Mr. Sandford, if it’s really true that your ma knows, I’ll take back my warning, sir, and we’ll try again. But oh, you’re young, and you don’t know how quick things go when you take the wrong road. Oh, Mr. Sandford, though you’ve had so much of your liberty, you’re very young still!’

‘Do you think so?’ said John, with a faint smile. He felt a hundred: there seemed no spring of youth or hope left in him. Then he said suddenly, with an almost childlike appeal to human kindness: ‘I’ve had no food all day. Go and get me something to eat like a kind soul. I’ve had no dinner or anything.’

‘No dinner!’ she said, with an outcry of distress. This seemed something so dreadful, such a breach of all natural laws, that it swept away every lesser emotion. And John, too, though he had said this not because he was hungry, felt a little quiver in his own lip as he realised the extraordinary fact. He had had no dinner! Such a thing had perhaps never happened before in his whole life.

In the evening, when he sat alone with no company but his lamp, having eaten and refreshed himself (and to his own great wonder he was quite hungry when food was set before him, though he did not think he could have tasted a morsel), John heard a soft step pass two or three times close to his window. The street was very quiet after dark, and there was so much significance in the persistent re-passing, so close as if the passer-by meant to look in at the sides of his blind, that his attention was roused. He looked out cautiously, but saw no one. His heart began to beat high—who could it be but one person? John recollected suddenly the soft tread, the cautious, carefully-poised foot, as of one used to moving about steadily, to wearing shoes such as indoor dwellers wear. It came over him with a sickening sensation that a tread so soft would be useful to those who lived by preying upon others: and then a bitter self-reproach seized him: for the unfortunate who had suddenly become so interesting to him, was not, he said to himself, after all a common thief that he should think such horrible injurious things of him. While he was watching, listening, he heard all at once a ring at the door. The stealthy visitor had made up his mind at last. John stood waiting, breathless, in a miserable confusion of feeling, not knowing how he was to meet with, how he was to speak to the man who was his father, when the door opened. But it was not May who came in; it was a figure more unexpected, more startling, the tall dark shadow of a veiled woman, who, putting back part of the shade from her face as she entered noiselessly, presented the grave countenance of his mother, disturbed by unusual excitement to John’s astonished eyes.

CHAPTER X.
MOTHER AND SON.

Mrs. Sandford looked round upon the tidy little sitting-room, but with eyes of alarm that sought in the curtains and shadows for some apparition she feared, and not as a woman looks at the dwelling-place of her child. She had never been here before. Susie had visited him from time to time with a woman’s interest in his surroundings, but his mother never. It was all strange to her as if he had been a stranger. She gave that keen look round which noted nothing except what was its object, that there was nobody to be seen.

‘Is he here?’ she said, in a low voice of alarm, without any greeting or preface. Caresses did not pass between these two either at meeting or at parting, and there was no time to think even of the conventional salutation now.