“No, the young man.”
“That’s strange, isn’t it? Have you seen the young man?”
“I know nothing of him, except the little that the woman told me. He has written me a letter.”
“May I look at it?”
“I daren’t let you look at it!”
Amelius said no more. If he had felt the smallest suspicion that the disclosure volunteered by Mrs. Farnaby, at their first interview, had been overheard by the unknown person who had opened the swinging window in the kitchen, he might have recalled Phoebe’s vindictive language at his lodgings, and the doubts suggested to him by his discovery of the vagabond waiting for her in the street. As it was, he was simply puzzled. The one plain conclusion to his mind was, unhappily, the natural conclusion after what he had heard—that Mrs. Farnaby had no sort of interest in the discovery of Simple Sally, and that he need trouble himself with no further anxiety in that matter. Strange as Mrs. Farnaby’s mysterious revelation seemed, her correspondent’s knowledge of the fault in the foot was circumstance in his favour, beyond dispute. Amelius still wondered inwardly how it was that the woman who had taken charge of the child had failed to discover what appeared to be known to another person. If he had been aware that Mrs. Sowler’s occupation at the time was the occupation of a “baby-farmer,” and that she had many other deserted children pining under her charge, he might have easily understood that she was the last person in the world to trouble herself with a minute examination of any one of the unfortunate little creatures abandoned to her drunken and merciless neglect. Jervy had satisfied himself, before he trusted her with his instructions, that she knew no more than the veriest stranger of any peculiarity in one or the other of the child’s feet.
Interpreting Mrs. Farnaby’s last reply to him as an intimation that their interview was at an end, Amelius took up his hat to go.
“I hope with all my heart,” he said, “that what has begun so well will end well. If there is any service that I can do for you—”
She drew nearer to him, and put her hand gently on his shoulder. “Don’t think that I distrust you,” she said very earnestly; “I am unwilling to shock you—that is all. Even this great joy has a dark side to it; my miserable married life casts its shadow on everything that happens to me. Keep secret from everybody the little that I have told you—you will ruin me if you say one word of it to any living creature. I ought not to have opened my heart to you—but how could I help it, when the happiness that is coming to me has come through you? When you say good-bye to me to-day, Amelius, you say good-bye to me for the last time in this house. I am going away. Don’t ask me why—that is one more among the things which I daren’t tell you! You shall hear from me, or see me—I promise that. Give me some safe address to write to; some place where there are no inquisitive women who may open my letter in your absence.”
She handed him her pocket-book. Amelius wrote down in it the address of his club.