“I can very well believe it. Especially when I look at your eyes.”
“Mother said my eyes were just like my father's,” said Fan, with growing confidence and a touch of pride.
“Perhaps they are like his in one way, my poor girl,” said the other, a little frown clouding her forehead. “In another way they are very different, I should think. No one who ever did a cruel thing could have had that expression in his eyes.”
After sitting in silence for some time, still with that frown on her beautiful face, her eyes resting thoughtfully on the tessellated floor, she roused herself, and taking out her purse, gave Fan half-a-crown.
“Go home now,” she said, “and come again to-morrow at the same hour.”
Fan went from the door with a novel sense of happiness filling her heart. At intervals she took out the half-crown from her pocket to look at it. What a great broad noble coin it looked to her eyes! It was old—nearly seventy years old—and the lines on it were blurred, and yet it seemed wonderfully bright and beautiful to Fan; even the face of George the Third on it, which had never been called beautiful, now really seemed so to her. But very soon she ceased thinking about the half-crown and all that it represented; it was not that which caused the strange happiness in her heart, but the gentle compassionate words that the proud-looking lady had spoken to her. Never before had so sweet an experience come to her; how long it would live in her memory—the strange tender words, the kindly expression of the eyes, the touch of the soft white hand—to refresh her like wine in days of hunger and weariness!
It was early still in the day, and many hours before she could return to Dudley Grove; and so she continued roaming about, and found another doorstep to clean, and received threepence for cleaning it, to her surprise. With the threepence she bought all the food she required. The half-crown she would not break into; that must be shown to the poor washer-woman just as she had received it. When the woman saw it in the evening she was very much astonished, and expressed the feeling, if it be not a contradiction to say so, by observing a long profound silence. But like the famous parrot she “thought the more,” and at length she gave it as her opinion that the lady intended taking Fan as a servant in her house.
“Oh, do you really think so?” exclaimed Fan, becoming excited at the prospect of such happiness. And after a while she added, “Then I'll leave you the half-crown for all you've done for me.”
The poor woman would not listen to such a proposal; but next morning she consented to take charge of it, promising, if Fan should not return, to use it.