“Of course; that accounts for it. You have over-taxed your strength. Have you no one who can take your place?”
“No,” she responded, with a strange sadness which seemed an index to her character; “I have, unfortunately, no one. Frank is rather irritable, and will have nobody about him except myself.”
Brother and sister appeared devoted to each other.
She spoke of him in a tone betraying that deep fraternal affection which nowadays is not common.
I waited while the boy Siddons closed the surgery and put out the lights, and then, having locked the outer door, we walked together to the cab-stand at the top of Beresford Street and entered a hansom, giving directions to drive to Blackheath.
The man seemed rather surprised at such an order at such an hour, but nevertheless, nothing loth to take a fare outside the radius, he whipped up, and drove straight down the Boyson Road, through into Albany Road, one of the decayed relics of bygone Camberwell when the suburb was fashionable in the days of George the Third, and on into that straight, never-ending thoroughfare, the Old Kent Road.
Seated side by side our conversation naturally turned upon conversational subjects, and presently she remarked upon the great heat of the day just closed, whereupon I told her how oppressed I had been by it, because of my recent voyage where the sea breeze was always fresh and the spray combined with the brilliant sunshine.
“Ah!” she sighed, “I would so much like to go abroad. I’ve never been farther than Paris, and, after all, that’s so much like London. I would dearly like a voyage up the Mediterranean. The ports you put into must have been a perfect panorama of the various phases of life.”
“Yes,” I said, “the Italian is so different from the Syrian, the Syrian from the African, and the African from the Spanish. It is all so fresh and new. You would be charmed with it. The only disagreeable part is the return to hot and overcrowded London.”
“Myself, I hate London,” was her remark. “The fresh open country always appeals to me, and Blackheath, you know, is better than nothing at all.”