"No, indeed," interposed the girl eagerly; "he tried to dissuade me from coming to you; he seemed frightened when I proposed it; it is my own thought; I am acting on my own responsibility. I said to myself, 'If he only knows what Emmie suffers, how often she is cold and hungry, and sad, he will do something to make her poor life happier.'"
"My good young woman, no melodrama, if you please. I have all my life confined myself strictly to facts. Miss Titheridge's establishment for young ladies is the most respectable in Carlisle. I have heard much from my clients in her praise; no one has ever before informed me that her pupils are cold or half-starved—facts, if you please, facts."
"I am speaking sober truth," returned Queenie, coloring. "I am one of Miss Titheridge's governesses, and, as far as I can tell, her pupils have no cause for complaint; it is only Emmie."
Mr. Calcott shook his head incredulously, and took another pinch of snuff, this time somewhat irritably.
"I work for my own and Emmie's board," she went on, "and we pay a few pounds besides—all that we can spare. I do not complain for myself that the accommodation is bad and the food insufficient, though it is so for a growing child; but the food is such that Emmie cannot eat it, and often and often I have seen her cry from sheer cold and misery."
"Tut, some children will be fretful—aye, and dainty too."
"Emmie is bred up in too hard a school for daintiness; she is wasting and pining for want of proper nourishment and care and kindness. They are killing her by inches," continued Queenie, losing self-restraint and clasping her hands together. "When she cannot learn they shut her up in a desolate garret at the top of the house, where she gets frightened and has gloomy fancies; they will not listen to me when I tell them she is weak and ill. She is getting so thin that I can carry her, and yet they will not see it."
"Humph! all this is very pleasant. Young lady, you are determined to have your say, and I have let you say it; now you must listen to me. You are trying to plead the cause of Emily Calcott, my niece, to interest me in her favor. What if I tell you," continued Mr. Calcott, raising his voice a little till it sounded harder and more metallic—"what if I tell you that I have no niece?"
"It would not be the truth, Mr. Calcott."
"What if I tell you that I have renounced the relationship," reiterated the old man, frowning at the interruption; "what if I once had a sister Emily, but that from the time of her marriage she became nothing to me! She left me," he went on, lashing himself into white passion by the remembrance of his wrongs, "when she knew I was a lonely, suffering man,—suffering mentally, suffering physically,—aye, when she knew too that she was the only thing spared to me out of the wreck of my life, that I cared for nothing in the world but her."