“Dear lady,” said I, taking her aside a moment while Brent spoke to Mr. Clitheroe, “we are acquaintances of to-day; but campaigners must despise ceremony. Your father has told me much of your history. I infer your feelings. Consider me as a brother. Nothing can be done to aid you?”
“Your kindness and your friend’s kindness touch me greatly. Nothing can be done.”
She sobbed a little. I still held her hand.
“Nothing!” said I, “nothing! Will you go on with these people? you, a lady! with your fate staring you in the face!”
She withdrew her hand and looked at me steadily with her large gray eyes. What a woman to follow into the jaws of death!
“My fate,” she said, “can be no worse than the old common fate of death. That I accept, any other I defy. God does not leave the worthy to shame.”
“We say so, when we hope.”
“I say it and believe.”
“Come, Ellen dear,” called her father.
There was always between them, whenever they spoke, by finer gentleness of tone and words of endearment, a recognition of how old and close and exclusive was their union. Only when Sizzum was present at tea, the tenderness, under that coarsening influence, passed away from the father’s voice and manner, making the daughter’s more and more tender, that she might win him back to her.