"Don't you know me, sir," said the stranger, taking Mr. Dryce's hand and sitting in the firelight. "My name is Robert Dryce, and this is my child, whose mother left it to the mercy of Heaven, and found that it had reached its natural home. Forgive us, sir, for our child's sake."
Old Dryce was a shrewd man, but it took an hour to make him understand it all; events had come about so strangely.
"Well," said Robert at last, "I'm glad you were in time to save the money."
"Confound the money!" ejaculated the old man; "at least, too much of it," he added, correcting himself. "This baby's hand has unlocked more treasures for me than all the Bank of England could count on a summer's day."
——————————————
"Oh, I shouldn't like to live in London always," said Kate Bell, whose father was one of the large mill-owners at Barton. "I've been up twice with papa, you know; but we lived in a great square where we could hear the noise of the cabs all night, and of the carts and wagons as soon as daylight came. And then there are such crowds of people in the streets; and if you walk you are pushed about so, and if you ride you can't see anything except from an open carriage. Except the theatre, where I went twice, and the Zoological Gardens and the Crystal Palace, and Hyde Park, where everybody goes before dinner, there's nothing to care for."
"Nothing to care for!" exclaimed Annie Bowers; "why, the streets and the old historical buildings—Westminster Abbey, the Picture Galleries, the great solemn churches, with monuments of poets and warriors, and the constant life and movement and change, must be grand, if one only could stay long enough to get over the feeling that you are only sight-seeing. To be a part of it all, and to be able to go about quietly and live in it, looking and thinking and making one's own pictures and one's own romances of it, would be delightful for six months in the year. I often think it would be grand to spend a summer day in the middle of one of the bridges—Westminster or London Bridge—and watch the boats on the river and the tide of people coming and going, and see the clouds and the sunshine change the colour of the stream and the outlines of the great buildings, and then to go back just at dark and see the same scene by moonlight, with everything transformed and solemn, and listen to the rush of the tide and watch the lights twinkling on wharves and on board boats and barges, and the moon on the great lovely buildings of Westminster, and the dome of St. Paul's in the distance: that is what I should like to do."
"I used to think very much as you do, Annie, when I was last in London," said Miss Grantley; "but then I had very little opportunity of going to theatres or other amusements, for I had no one to take me except in a family party, and had to make the most of the pleasure that is to be found in the wonderful aspects of the great city itself. Of course it is only possible for a poor unprotected creature to see a part of the greatest capital in the world; and so when I went to explore the bridges or any other neighbourhood after dusk I took an escort, and one who knew London so well that he was able to say where I ought and where I ought not to go."
"A policeman, was it, Miss Grantley?" said Kate Bell.
"Oh, dear! no. Policemen have no time to go out as escorts to young or middle-aged ladies," said our governess laughing. "My cavalier was a boy who worked at a printing-office. His mother was a very respectable woman who lived in a tidy house in a very quiet street where she let two furnished rooms, and I was her tenant while I was studying to pass two examinations. I had been staying with old friends of my dear father, for they did not desert me altogether though I was only a governess; indeed, they gave me too large a share of the amusements and sight-seeing which take up so much time, so that I was obliged to bid them good-bye for a good while, and restrict my visits to Sundays or one evening a week. I think my landlady, who was a widow, had been their cook; but at all events she was a good motherly woman, and her boy of fourteen was always ready for an excursion when he came home from work.