‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘what is wrong. Tell me what is wrong. The secret, if it is a secret, will be safe with me: but you cannot bear this pressure; you must have some relief to your mind. Susie—I will call you what Elly calls you for once—do you know what I was going to say to you when she came?’
Susie raised her tear-stained face to his with a little surprise, and said no.
‘So much the worse for my chances,’ he said, with a faint smile. ‘You might have divined, perhaps; yet why should you? I was going to tell you a great many things I will not say now—to explain——’ Something like a blush came upon his middle-aged countenance. ‘This is not the time for that. I was going to ask you if you would marry me. There: that is all. You see by this that I am ready to keep all your secrets, and help you and serve you every way I can. It is only for this reason that I tell you now. Will you take the good of me, Susie, without troubling yourself with the thought of anything I may ask in return? There, now! Poor child, you are worn out. Tell me what it is.’
‘Oh, Mr. Cattley,’ she cried, and could say no more.
‘Never mind Mr. Cattley: tell me what troubles you—that is the first thing to think of. I guess as much as that it is something which poor Jack has found out, but which you knew. I will go further, and tell you what I guessed long ago—that this poor father has done something in which there was trouble and shame.’
He had seated himself by her and taken her hand, holding it firmly between his, and looking into her face. Susie felt, as many have felt before her, that here all at once was a stranger to whom she could say what she could not have said to the most familiar friend.
‘We hoped,’ she said, in a low voice—‘we thought—that nobody knew.’
‘Not John?’
‘Oh, John last of all; that was why he lived here; that was why we left him, mother and I, and never came, and let him think that he was nothing to us. He thought we had no love for him. He said to mother once that she was not his mother. Ah!’ cried Susie, with a low cry of pain at that recollection, ‘all that he might never know.’
‘And now he has found out: how do you think he can have found out?’