"I beg your pardon. I am very stupid. I am afraid I have caused you pain. Believe me, I am extremely sorry."
"No, no; you must not say anything more of that. But you will come?"
"It is strange," said he in a tone of profound abstraction; "it is strange that the two little motherless boys should take such a liking to one another, and that both should come to this district--this place--at about the same time."
He had forgotten the girl's presence. Like most men who have lived long in solitude, he had contracted the habit of talking aloud to himself, and he was now unconscious that he had a listener.
"We may count on you?"
He awoke with a start: he did not know exactly to what the question referred. He was aware that he had been keeping the girl waiting for an answer, and that she had asked him for a favour in return for the loan of a companion for his boy. He blurted out "Certainly," and was back on the Ait once more before he realised the nature of the promise he had made.
CHAPTER XIV.
[THE FIRE AT RICHMOND.]
A more devoted husband was not in all Richmond than William Crawford. A more trusting and affectionate wife could not be found in all England than Ellen, his wife, whom in tones of great tenderness he always called Nellie. To her first husband, old Thomas Crawford, whom she had married in the zenith of her maiden beauty twenty-five years ago, when she was twenty-two, she had ever been Ellen. Her name in his mouth had always seemed cold and stately; at home she had always been Nellie. But the dignity of marriage, and of marriage with a man forty years older than herself, had elevated her into Mrs. Crawford among outsiders and Ellen among her own relatives and in her own house.
Her husband, father and mother, and only brother had been dead some time before her present husband came to live next door to her at Singleton Terrace, Richmond. She was a confirmed invalid, and had been unable to move about freely for four years. She had always been the gentlest of the good, and rested quite resigned to her fate. She never repined, never grumbled, never murmured. Except while in the throes of pain, her face wore a placid look, which changed into a smile when any one spoke to her or came near her.