“And I am even more amazed to see you here,” I answered without any of my wits to help me, “but I came to do a little bit of business with the butcher. He has been doing things he had no right to do.”
“I have often been told that they are inclined to take advantage,” she replied, with a look which convinced me at once that she would make a first-rate housekeeper, for what butcher could resist it? “My dear father would have much trouble with them, if, if—I mean if he were at all allowed to have it. But he is always so full of great things.”
“Oh, what a happy man he must be! I have heard that he is the most clever, and learned, and one of the most celebrated men in London.”
I may not have heard all that, but still I was perfectly justified in saying it, for it made her talk; and every time she spoke, her voice sounded sweeter than it did the time before.
“You have been told the truth; it is acknowledged universally,” she went on as if there were no fame to equal his, and with a sparkle in her blue eyes, as if a star had flashed in heaven; “there seems to be nothing that he does not know, and nothing that he does not improve by his knowledge, and make useful for—I mean for the world at large. How I can be his child, and yet so stupid and slow-witted, is a thing that amazes me, and I am trying always not to think of it.”
“I am sure you are not stupid. I am sure you are very quick-witted. I never saw any one half so clever, and accomplished, and ladylike, and gentle, and”—“lovely” was the word I was about to use; but she stopped me, with a smile that would have stopped a rushing bull.
“I am showing my quick wits now,” she said, presenting the charm of her hand again, “by never even thanking you for all you did last evening. I was thinking before you appeared, that but for you I should probably be tossing in these wild waters now, or probably carried down as far as London Bridge, without a chance even of being buried. And it made me so sad, when I remembered that it would make no difference to any one.”
“How can you say such a dreadful thing?” I exclaimed with great indignation, for her eyes that had been so full of light were darkened with sadness, and turned away; “it is not true that I saved you in the least, though I wish that I had; I should deserve to live for ever; but you speak as if no one in the world had any love for the sweetest, and best, and most lovely creature in it.”
This was going rather far, I must confess; not that any word of it was at all exaggerated, or even approached the proper mark; but that it might seem a little early, on the part of one who had never had the pleasure of beholding the lady, till the previous afternoon. The remembrance of this was very awkward to me, and I was wild with myself, but could not stop the mischief now.