Thus brought together, in a strange country, and agitated by a hundred memories, nothing was at first made clear, except that we belonged to one another, and Sœr Marie had long fled to carry the tale with mingled glee and horror into the house, before we grew sufficiently calm to answer the numberless questions which it occurred to each to ask.
At length Mary, pressed to tell me how she had fared since her escape, made one of the odd faces I could so well remember. And "Not as I would, but as I could," she said, dryly. "By crossing with letters."
"Crossing?" I exclaimed.
"To be sure," she answered. "I go to and from London with letters."
"But should you be taken?" I cried, with a vivid remembrance of the terror into which the prospect of punishment had thrown her.
She shrugged her shoulders; yet suppressed, or I was mistaken, a shudder. Then "What will you?" she said, spreading out her little hands French fashion, and making again that odd grimace. "It is the old story. I must live, Dick. And what can a woman do? Will Lady Middleton take me for her children's governante? Or Lady Melfort find me a place in her household? I am Ferguson's niece, a backstairs wench of whom no one knows anything. If I were handsome now, bien! As I am not--to live I must risk my living."
"You are handsome enough for me!" I cried.
She raised her eyebrows, with a look in her eyes that, I remember, puzzled me. "Well, may be," she said a trifle tartly. "And the other is neither here nor there. For the rest, Dick, I live at Captain Gill's, and his wife claws me Monday and kisses me Tuesday."
"And you have taken letters to London?" I said, wondering at her courage.
"Three times," she answered, nodding soberly. "And to Tunbridge once. A woman passes. A man would be taken. So Mr. Birkenhead says. But----" and with the word she broke off abruptly, and stared at me; and continued to stare at me, her face which was rounder and more womanly than in the old days, falling strangely.