Ruth’s voice as she proceeded had grown shrill and tremulous with the effect of the emotions, long pent up, that found expression at last, and she pressed her slender hand upon her heated brow with a gesture which Hold was not slow to mark.
‘Come, come, Missy,’ he said in accents far more gentle than those which he had first employed; ‘you’ve taken this thing, whatever it is, too much to heart. See, now; I’d never have suggested the plan if I had not believed that in the house of Sir Sykes Denzil, Baronet, you’d have been like a fish in water. Didn’t we always call you in joke “My Lady,” and that because your ways weren’t as our plain ways? Haven’t you got your head stuffed as full of book-learning as an egg is full of meat? Aren’t you dainty and proud and what not? Till folks declared, to be sister o’ mine, you must have been changed at nurse. And now do you find it a hardship to have to consort with yon Denzil people?—not your equals, I’ll be bound, if all had their due.’
‘You can’t understand me, Brother Dick,’ said the girl softly, and turning away her face. ‘Give me, I say, a real stand-point; let not my life be a lie, and I should fear no comparison with those who are daily my dupes. But I hold my tenure of the bed I sleep on, the bread I eat, by mere sufferance, and I see no way as yet to’——
‘That fop—the dandy Lancer fellow—Captain Jasper don’t seem to take to you then?’ asked Hold; and Ruth winced perceptibly at the blunt question.
‘Captain Denzil will never, I imagine, care very much for any one but his dear self,’ she answered gently. ‘Now that he is an invalid—though he will soon be out and about again—he thinks that he pays me no small compliment in preferring my conversation to the insipid society of his excellent sisters. But I no more expect a proposal of marriage from Jasper Denzil than I expect the sky to fall.’
‘That’s a pity,’ said Hold dryly; and then a pause ensued. ‘You didn’t send for me, Missy, to tell me that?’ he added, after some moments spent in thought.
‘No!’ returned Ruth in her low clear voice. ‘I sent for you that you might read a letter—how obtained I leave you to guess—which concerns us both. Have you the means of doing so?’
‘Catch me without light, Missy!’ complacently replied the seaman, drawing from one of his deep coat-pockets a small dark-lantern, which he lighted. ‘Now for this letter,’ he said; and receiving it from Ruth’s hand, read it attentively twice over. As he did so, some rays from the shaded lantern that he held illumined his resolute face.
‘Wilkins, eh? Enoch Wilkins. That’s the name the craft hails by; and he’s a land-shark, it seems,’ muttered Hold, as he refolded the document.