“Oh yes, I know,” said Jonah; “but it’s all very well for you, who’ve got years to get right in. It’s too short notice for me to begin all that over again. I don’t want to hear about it.”
He lingered on day after day, and it was absolutely necessary for Jeffreys to go and seek work in order to keep even that wretched roof above their heads.
One evening when he returned with a few coppers, Jonah met him with a face brighter than any that he had yet seen.
“I’ve had some one here to-day. A better sort than you. One that’s got a right to talk about what’s better. A lady, John, or else an angel. Did you send her?”
“I? No; I know no ladies.”
“I don’t know how it was, I could tell her anything—and, I say, John, it would make you cry to hear her voice. It did me. You never made me cry, or saw me; I hate to hear you preach; but she—why, she doesn’t preach at all, but she says all you’ve got to say a hundred times better.”
He was excited and feverish that night, and in his sleep murmured scraps of the gentle talk of his ministering angel, which even from his lips fell with a reflected sweetness on the trouble-tossed spirit of the watcher.
Jeffreys had succeeded in getting a temporary job which took him away during the next two days. But each night on his return he found his invalid brighter and softened in spirit by reason of his angel’s visits.
“She’ll come to-morrow, John. There’s magic in her, I tell you. I see things I never saw before. You’ve been kind to me, John, and given up a lot for me, but if you were to hear her—”
Here the dying youth could get no farther.