"I hope you really mean that. I am sure I must seem very rude and unpolished in your eyes; but I would have been far more so, had it not been for you."
"For me?"
"Yes." And he told her about the Christmas morning in Fourteenth Street.
"And you remembered that little thing all this time!" Mary exclaimed. "And you were once a newsboy!"
"Yes; I was once a great, stupid, ragged newsboy. I do not mean to deny, to conceal anything. I am so very sorry, for your sake; but I hope you will like me in spite of it all. If just those few words and that one smile did so much for me, what is there your influence may not do?"
"Mr. Heremore, I do not in the least understand you."
"I don't know where to begin; this has excited me so that I do not know what I am saying, and now I wish almost that you might never know it; there is such a difference between us that I cannot tell how to begin."
"Is it necessary that you should begin?" asked Mary. "You told me you wished to speak to me, of some discoveries you had made in regard to yourself. To anything about yourself I will listen with interest; but I do not care to have anything said about myself; there can be no connection between the two subjects that I can see; so pray do not waste words on so poor a subject as myself; but tell me the discovery, if you please."
"But it concerns you as much as it does me. Do you know much about your own mother? She died, you told me, long ago."
"I know very little about her. I presume her death was a great grief to papa; for he has never permitted a word to be said about her, and anything that pains papa in that way is never alluded to. The little I do know I have learned from my old nurse."