"The boy will not be alone. Why, now that you have decided to leave the stage across all night, your house and ours may be looked on as one."
What a pleasant fancy it was that Crawford's House, where she lived, and Boland's Ait, where he lived, might be looked on as one!
"If," went on Layard, "you are uneasy about your boy, at any moment you can run across and see him. You really have no excuse. Our sons have been friends some time, and now you have placed me under a great obligation to you, and you refuse to make the obligation greater. Is that generous of you?"
Bramwell smiled. "I am conquered, fairly conquered."
"Very well; and mind, not later than eight o'clock. Now, where's this young savage of mine? His aunt will imagine you have sold the two of us into slavery."
CHAPTER XXVII.
[A LAST RESOLVE.]
"Good gracious, Mrs. Mellor, you don't mean to say you have been to the hospital and got back again since! But why do I say such a thing? If you had wings you couldn't do it," exclaimed kind-hearted Mrs. Pemberton as Kate Mellor walked into the greengrocer's shop in Leeham, hard by Welford, the same day William Crawford jumped aboard the moving steamboat after his immersion and scene with the invalid woman at the Mercantile Pier.
"No," answered Mrs. Mellor wearily. She did not remove her veil on entering the shop. "I hadn't the heart to go to-day. I got as far as the pier and then turned back." She did not care to enter into any further explanation.
"Hadn't the heart, dear child! And why hadn't you the heart?" said the sympathetic woman, raising her ponderous bulk with deliberation from the chair, and going quickly with outstretched hands to her unfortunate lodger.