I rode back to the inn to find a telegram from Mr. Gascoyne to his niece which she had sent over for me to see. It was to say that he would come by the evening train. There were only four trains to Copsley Station on Sunday—two each way—and the London train did not arrive till ten o’clock. I saw her in the early evening. She seemed worn out with grief, and there was, I thought, a quite tragic loneliness in her appearance.
It pleased her to talk of her dead brother, and, sitting there saying all the nice things I could about him, and full of a real and genuine sympathy for her, I could hardly realise that it was I who had knelt in the dusky lane with my fingers on the dying youth’s throat.
“He had a great admiration for you,” she said, with a faint smile. “He thought you the cleverest person he had ever met.”
“His was one of the sunniest natures; no one could help loving him.”
“He was spoilt, of course. My father spoilt him terribly. It was not to be wondered at if he was a little wild.”
I allowed her to talk on till I rose to go and meet Mr. Gascoyne.
“I don’t know why,” she said, as she came out into the lane with me, “but I have always imagined my uncle to be a very hard man. I read ‘Nicholas Nickleby’ when I was a little girl, and I could not help drawing a comparison between my father, who was like Nicholas’s father, and lived in the country, and my uncle, who, of course, represented Ralph Nickleby.”
I smiled. “You will find Mr. Gascoyne very different from that. He is much softened of late, but I don’t think that he has ever been a miser, even if at times he has carried the principle of justice to the verge of hardness.”
I was thinking of the circumstances of my first appeal to him.
When I left her I went at once to the station, and, as the train was late, had some time to wait.