Maurice closed his drowsy eyes with a delicious sense of luxurious forgetfulness, and then opened them with a start; for some one had gently called him by his name, and for a moment he thought it was still his dream, for standing at the foot of the couch was a girl as beautiful as any vision, who held out her hand to him, and said in the sweetest voice he had ever heard:
“Mr. Trafford, you have saved my father’s life. I shall be grateful to you all my life.”
Maurice was almost dizzy as he stood up and looked at the girl’s earnest face and eyes brimming over with tears, and the sunlight and the violets and the children’s voices seemed all confused; and as he took her offered hand a strange shyness kept him silent.
“I have heard all about it,” she went on. “I know, while others stood by too terrified to move, you risked your own life to protect my father—that you stood between him and death while they dragged him out from the horses’ feet. It was noble—heroic;” and here Nea clasped her hands, and the tears ran down her cheeks.
Poor impetuous child; these were hardly the cold words of civility that her pompous father had dictated, and were to supplement the thirty pounds per annum, “officially delivered.” Surely, as she looked at the young man in his shabby coat, she must have remembered that it was only Maurice Trafford the junior clerk—the drudge of a mercantile house.
Nea owned afterward that she had forgotten everything; in after years she confessed that Maurice’s grave young face came upon her like a revelation.
She had admirers by the score—the handsome, weak-minded Lord Bertie among them—but never had she seen such a face as Maurice Trafford’s, the poor curate’s son.
Maurice’s pale face flushed up under the girl’s enthusiastic praise, but he answered, very quietly:
“I did very little, Miss Huntingdon; any one could have done as much. How could I stand by and see your father’s danger, and not go to his help?” and then, as the intolerable pain in his arm brought back the faintness, he asked her permission to reseat himself. “He would go home,” he said, wearily, “and then he need trouble no one.”
Nea’s heart was full of pity for him. She could not bear the thought of his going back to his lonely lodgings, with no one to take care of him, but there was no help for it. So Mrs. Thorpe was summoned with her remedies, and the carriage was ordered. When it came round Maurice looked up in his young hostess’s face with his honest gray eyes and frank smile and said good-bye. And the smile and the gray eyes, and the touch of the thin, boyish hand, were never to pass out of Nea’s memory from that day.