"My gratitude--my love, if you care for it--will always be yours! I can never repay even a tithe of the kindness shown me by Lady Dudgeon and yourself."
"Eleanor, I have no patience with you!" cried Lady Dudgeon, dipping her pen viciously in the inkstand.
"But where is the girl going, and what is she going to do?" asked the baronet.
"Let her answer for herself."
"You will think it very strange of me, I dare say," said Eleanor; "but Miss Mulhouse, whose name is no doubt familiar to you, has offered to find me a position in one of the Homes for Destitute Girls, which she is trying to establish in different parts of London."
"Heaven bless us!" exclaimed Sir Thomas. "You don't mean to say that you are going to leave a place like Stammars on purpose to spend your days in a back slum in the east end of London?"
"I am going to try to find something to do," said Eleanor. "I am going to try to make myself of some little use in the world."
"A madcap scheme, my dear--I can call it nothing else," said the old gentleman, with a melancholy shake of the head "If you feel charitably disposed, a twenty-pound note at Christmas, judiciously laid out, will go a long way--a very long way, indeed."
"To give money alone does not seem to me enough. I want to work for those poor helpless ones; to labour for them with head and hands; to learn their histories and their wants; to win their sympathies, and to make their lives a little less hard, if I can possibly do so."
"My dear," said Sir Thomas, turning to his wife, "what a pity it is that you have not found a husband for Miss Lloyd!"