"You, of course, have heaps of relations; you can pick and choose," she went on, as if eager to explain to his fastidious taste her toleration of a man, so obviously the denizen of an inferior world. "You cannot, I daresay, imagine the loneliness of a girl of my age, debarred, through no fault of her own, from the society of her own kith and kin." Here was an opportunity to engage her in personal talk. He had not hoped she would take him into her confidence on his first visit.
He leaned forward, and there was an eager note in his voice. "I formed an idea of you in the first few moments of our acquaintance, that you were not happy, that you were, in a sense, isolated, and that you had known more of sorrow than joy in your short life."
She mused a moment, and then answered him in grave tones:
"You were quite right. I feel it is the impression I must convey to either friend or stranger, an impression I shall always convey. For, if a great and overwhelming happiness were to come to me to-morrow, I could never forget the past years of sadness."
"But, surely, you must have some happy memories? There were gleams of brightness in your childhood?"
"No," she said, and there was a fierce vehemence in her voice. "They were the most miserable—an indifferent mother, a careless father, a roof and a shelter, food and clothing sufficient, if not in abundance, but no home, as it is understood by more fortunate children."
"And when that home, or the wretched pretence of it, was broken up, you were thrown upon the mercy of the world," he questioned, "with no kindred, no friends to stretch out a helping hand?"
"Our relatives had long before ceased to take any interest in the daughter of a ruined gambler. I was thrown, in a certain sense, on the mercy of the world. But for a small pittance, which my father could not deprive me of, I should have starved, for he left nothing behind him but debts."
She was not, then, absolutely penniless. Something had been saved from the wreck. He wondered if Esmond knew this. And yet, if she told a comparative stranger this at their first real interview, she must have told him, who seemed to be on the footing of a friend of the house.
"I had no real friends," she went on; "but in the course of a wandering life—when my father owed too much in one place he removed to another—I had picked up a few acquaintances. With these I made a home, on and off, for longer or shorter periods."