“Do, Duffham. Take Jones to help you?”
“Jones be shot,” returned Duff in a passion. “If I wanted any one—which I don’t—I’d take Johnny. He is worth fifty Joneses. Say nothing—nothing at all. Do you understand?”
He went off down a side path, and crossed Jenkins, who was at work now. Monk stayed in the greenhouse.
“This is a sad calamity, Jenkins.”
“It’s the worst I ever met with, sir,” cried Jenkins, touching his hat. “And what have done it is the odd thing. Monk, he talks of the candles poisoning of ’em; but I don’t know.”
“Well, there’s not a much surer poison than arsenic, Jenkins,” said the doctor, candidly. “I hope it will be cleared up. Monk, too, has taken so much pains with the plants. He is a clever young man in his vocation. Where did you hear of him?”
Jenkins’s answer was a long one. Curtailed, it stated that he had heard of Monk “promiskeous.” He had thought him a gentleman till he asked if he, Jenkins, could help him to a place as ornamental gardener. He had rather took to the young man, and recommended the Squire to employ him “temporay,” for he, Jenkins, was just then falling sick with rheumatism.
Mr. Duffham nodded approvingly. “Didn’t think it necessary to ask for references?”
“Monk said he could give me a cart-load a’most of them, sir, if I’d wanted to see ’em.”
“Just so! Good-day, Jenkins, I can’t stay gossiping my morning away.”
He went straight to Mrs. Picker’s, and caught her taking her luncheon off the kitchen-table—bread-and-cheese, and perry.
“It’s a little cask o’ last year’s my son have made me a present of, sir; if you’d be pleased to drink a cup, Dr. Duff’m,” said she, hospitably.
She drew a half-pint cup full; bright, sparkling, full-bodied perry, never better made in Gloucestershire. Mr. Duffham smacked his lips, and wished some of the champagne at gentlemen’s tables was half as good. He talked, and she talked; and, it may be, he took her a little off her guard. Evidently, she was not cognizant of the mishap to the greenhouse.
A nice young man that lodger of hers? Well, yes, he was; steady and well-conducted. Talked quite like a gentleman, but wasn’t uppish ’cause o’ that, and seemed satisfied with all she did for him. He was gone off to Evesham after seeds and other things. Squire Todhetley put great confidence in him.
“Ay,” said Mr. Duffham, “to be sure. One does put confidence in steady young men, you know, Goody. He was off by four o’clock, wasn’t he?”
Earlier nor that, Goody Picker thought. Monk were one o’ them who liked to take time by the forelock, and get his extra work forrard when he were put on to any.
“Nothing like putting the shoulder to the wheel. This is perry! The next time I call to see your son Peter, at Alcester, I shall ask him if he can’t get some for me. As to Monk—you might have had young fellows here who’d have idled their days away, and paid no rent, Goody. Monk was at his work late last night, too, I fancy?”
Goody fancied he had been; leastways he went out after supper, and were gone an hour or so. What with the fires, and what with the opening and shutting o’ the winders to keep the hot-houses at proper temperture, an head-gardener didn’t sit on a bed o’ idle roses, as Dr. Duff’m knew.
Mr. Duffham was beginning to make pretty sure of winning his game. His manner suddenly changed. Pushing the empty cup from him, he leaned forward, and laid hold of Mrs. Picker by the two wrists. Between the perry and the doctor’s sociability and Monk’s merits, her eyes had begun to sparkle.
“Don’t be alarmed, Mrs. Picker. I have come here to ask you a question, and you must answer me. But you have nothing to fear on your own score, provided you tell me the truth honestly. Young men will do foolish things, however industrious they may be. Why did Monk play that prank on Easter Monday?”
The sparkle in the eyes faded with fright. She would have got away, but could not, and so put on an air of wonder.
“On Easter Monday! What were it he did on Easter Monday?”
“When he put himself and his face into white, and went to the churchyard by moonlight to represent the dead, you know, Mrs. Picker.”
She gave a shrill scream, got one of her hands loose and flung it up to her face.
“Come, Goody, you had better answer me quietly than be taken to confess before Squire Todhetley. I dare say you were not to blame.”
Afore Squire Todhetley! O-o-o-o-o-h! Did they know it at the Manor?
“Well,” said Mr. Duffham, “you see I know it, and I have come straight from there. Now then, my good woman, I have not much time.”
Goody Picker’s will was good to hold out longer, but she surrendered à coup de main, as so many of us have to do when superior power is brought to bear. Monk overheered it, was the substance of her answer. On coming in from work that there same blessed evening—and look at him now! at his work on a Easter Monday till past dark!—he overheered the two servants, Molly and Hannah, talking of what they was going out to watch for—the shadows in the churchyard. He let ’em go, never showing hisself till they’d left the house. Then he got the sheets from his bed, and put the flour on his face, and went on there to frighten ’em; all in fun. He never thought of hurting the women; he never knowed as the young girl, Phœbe, was to be there. Nobody could be more sorry for it nor he was; but he’d never meant to do harm more nor a babby unborn.
Mr. Duffham released the hands. Looking back in reflection, he had little doubt it was as she said—that Monk had done it out of pure sport, not intending ill.
“He might have confessed: it would have been more honest. And you! why did you deny that it was Monk?”
Mrs. Picker at first could only stare in reply. Confess to it? Him? What, and run the risk o’ being put into ancuffs by that there Jones with his fat legs? And she! a poor old widder? If Monk went and said he didn’t do it, she couldn’t go and say he did. Doctor Duff’m might see as there were no choice left for her. Never should she forget the fright when the two young gents come in with their querries the next day; her fingers was took with the palsy and dropped the pudd’n basin, as she’d had fifteen year. Monk, poor fellow, couldn’t sleep for a peck o’ nights after, thinking o’ Phœbe.
“There; that’s enough,” said Mr. Duffham. “Who is Monk? Where does he come from?”
From the moon, for all Mrs. Picker knew. A civiler young man she’d not wish to have lodging with her; paid reg’lar as the Saturdays come round; but he never told her nothing about hisself.
“Which is his room? The one at the back, I suppose.”
Without saying with your leave, or by your leave, as Mrs. Picker phrased it in telling the story a long while afterwards, Mr. Duffham penetrated at once into the lodger’s room. There he took the liberty of making a slight examination, good Mrs. Picker standing by with round eyes and open mouth. And what he discovered caused him to stride off at once to the pater.
Roger Monk was not Monk at all, but somebody else. He had been implicated in some crime (whether guilty or not remained yet a question), and to avoid exposure had come away into this quiet locality under a false name. In short, during the time he had been working as gardener at Dyke Manor and living at Mother Picker’s, he was in hiding. As the son of a well-known and most respectable landscape and ornamental nursery-man, he had become thoroughly conversant with the requisite duties.
“They are fools, at the best, these fellows,” remarked Duffham, as he finished his narrative. “A letter written to him by some friend betrayed to me all this. Now why should not Monk have destroyed that letter, instead of keeping it in his room, Squire?”
The Squire did not answer. All he could do just now was to wipe his hot face and try to get over his amazement. Monk not a gardener or servant at all, but an educated man! Only living there to hide from the police; and calling himself by any name that came uppermost—which happened to be Monk!
“I must say there’s a certain credit due to him for his patient industry, and the perfection to which he has brought your grounds,” said Mr. Duffham.
“And for blighting all my hot-house plants at a blow—is there credit due to him for that?” roared out the Squire. “I’ll have him tried for it, as sure as my name’s Todhetley.”
It was easier said than done. For when Mr. Jones, receiving his private orders from the pater, went, staff in hand, to arrest Monk, that gentleman had already departed.
“He come into the house just as Dr. Duff’m left it,” explained Mrs. Picker. “Saying he had got to take a short journey, he put his things into his port-manty, and went off carrying of it, leaving me a week’s rent on the table.”
“Go and catch him, Jones,” sternly commanded the Squire, when the constable came back with the above news.
“Yes, your worship,” replied Jones. But how he was to do it, taking the gouty legs into consideration, was quite a different thing.
The men were sent off various ways. And came back again, not having come up with Monk. Squire Todhetley went into a rage, abused old Jones, and told him he was no longer worth his salt. But the strangest thing occurred in the evening.
The pater walked over to the Court after tea, carrying the grievance of his destroyed plants to the Sterlings. In coming up Dyke Lane as he returned at night, where it was always darker than in other places because the trees hid the moonlight, somebody seemed to walk right out of the hedge upon him.
It was Roger Monk. He raised his hat to the Squire as a gentleman does—did not touch it as a gardener—and began pleading for clemency.
“Clemency, after destroying a whole hot-houseful of rare plants!” cried the Squire.
“I never did it, sir,” returned Monk, passionately. “On my word as a man—I will not to you say as a gentleman—if the plants were not injured by the candles, as I fully believe, I know not how they could have been injured.”
The pater was staggered. At heart he was the best man living. Suppose Monk was innocent?
“Look here, Monk. You know your name is–”
“Hush, sir!” interposed Monk, hastily, as if to prevent the hedges hearing the true name. “It is of that I have waited to speak to you; to beseech your clemency. I have no need to crave it in the matter of plants which I never harmed. I want to ask you to be silent, sir; not to proclaim to the world that I am other than what I appeared to be. A short while longer and I should have been able to prove my innocence; things are working round. But if you set the hue-and-cry upon me–”
“Were you innocent?” interposed the Squire.
“I was; I swear it to you. Oh, Mr. Todhetley, think for a moment! I am not so very much older than your son; he is not more innocent than I was; but it might happen that he—I crave your pardon, sir, but it might—that he should become the companion of dissipated young men, and get mixed up unwittingly in a disgraceful affair, whose circumstances were so complicated that he could only fly for a time and hide himself. What would you say if the people with whom he took refuge, whether as servant or else, were to deliver him up to justice, and he stood before the world an accused felon? Sir, it is my case. Keep my secret; keep my secret, Mr. Todhetley.”
“And couldn’t you prove your innocence?” cried the Squire, as he followed out the train of ideas suggested.
“Not at present—that I see. And when once a man has stood at a criminal bar, it is a ban on him for life, although it may be afterwards shown he stood there wrongly.”
“True,” said the Squire, softening.
Well—for there’s no space to go on at length—the upshot was that Monk went away with a promise; and the Squire came home to the Manor and told Duffham, who was waiting there, that they must both be silent. Only those two knew of the discovery; they had kept the particulars and Monk’s real name to themselves. Duff gave his head a toss, and told the pater he was softer than old Jones.
“How came you to suspect him, Johnny?” he continued, turning on me in his sharp way.
“I think just for the same things that you did, Mr. Duffham—because neither his face nor his voice is true.”
And—remembering his look of revenge when accused in mistake for the magpie—I suspected him still.
THE EBONY BOX
I
In one or two of the papers already written for you, I have spoken of “Lawyer Cockermuth,” as he was usually styled by his fellow-townspeople at Worcester. I am now going to tell of something that happened in his family; that actually did happen, and is no invention of mine.
Lawyer Cockermuth’s house stood in the Foregate Street. He had practised in it for a good many years; he had never married, and his sister lived with him. She had been christened Betty; it was a more common name in those days than it is in these. There was a younger brother named Charles. They were tall, wiry men with long arms and legs. John, the lawyer, had a smiling, homely face; Charles was handsome, but given to be choleric.
Charles had served in the militia once, and had been ever since called Captain Cockermuth. When only twenty-one he married a young lady with a good bit of money; he had also a small income of his own; so he abandoned the law, to which he had been bred, and lived as a gentleman in a pretty little house on the outskirts of Worcester. His wife died in the course of a few years, leaving him with one child, a son, named Philip. The interest of Mrs. Charles Cockermuth’s money would be enjoyed by her husband until his death, and then would go to Philip.
When Philip left school he was articled to his uncle, Lawyer Cockermuth, and took up his abode with him. Captain Cockermuth (who was of a restless disposition, and fond of roving), gave up his house then and went travelling about. Philip Cockermuth was a very nice steady young fellow, and his father was liberal to him in the way of pocket-money, allowing him a guinea a-week. Every Monday morning Lawyer Cockermuth handed (for his brother) to Philip a guinea in gold; the coin being in use then. Philip spent most of this in books, but he saved some of it; and by the time he was of age he had sixty golden guineas put aside in a small round black box of carved ebony. “What are you going to do with it, Philip?” asked Miss Cockermuth, as he brought it down from his room to show her. “I don’t know what yet, Aunt Betty,” said Philip, laughing. “I call it my nest-egg.”
He carried the little black box (the sixty guineas quite filled it), back to his chamber and put it back into one of the pigeon-holes of the old-fashioned bureau which stood in the room, where he always kept it, and left it there, the bureau locked as usual. After that time, Philip put his spare money, now increased by a salary, into the Old Bank; and it chanced that he did not again look at the ebony box of gold, never supposing but that it was safe in its hiding-place. On the occasion of his marriage some years later, he laughingly remarked to Aunt Betty that he must now take his box of guineas into use; and he went up to fetch it. The box was not there.
Consternation ensued. The family flocked upstairs; the lawyer, Miss Betty, and the captain—who had come to Worcester for the wedding, and was staying in the house—one and all put their hands into the deep, dark pigeon-holes, but failed to find the box. The captain, a hot-tempered man, flew into a passion and swore over it; Miss Betty shed tears; Lawyer Cockermuth, always cool and genial, shrugged his shoulders and absolutely joked. None of them could form the slightest notion as to how the box had gone or who was likely to have taken it, and it had to be given up as a bad job.
Philip was married the next day, and left his uncle’s house for good, having taken one out Barbourne way. Captain Cockermuth felt very sore about the loss of the box, he strode about Worcester talking of it, and swearing that he would send the thief to Botany Bay if he could find him.
A few years more yet, and poor Philip became ill. Ill of the disorder which had carried off his mother—decline. When Captain Cockermuth heard that his son was lying sick, he being (as usual) on his travels, he hastened to Worcester and took up his abode at his brother’s—always his home on these visits. The disease was making very quick progress indeed; it was what is called “rapid decline.” The captain called in all the famed doctors of the town—if they had not been called before: but there was no hope.
The day before Philip died, his father spoke to him about the box of guineas. It had always seemed to the captain that Philip must have, or ought to have, some notion of how it went. And he put the question to him again, solemnly, for the last time.
“Father,” said the dying man—who retained all his faculties and his speech to the very end—“I declare to you that I have none. I have never been able to set up any idea at all upon the loss, or attach suspicion to a soul, living or dead. The two maids were honest; they would not have touched it; the clerks had no opportunity of going upstairs. I had always kept the key safely, and you know that we found the lock of the bureau had not been tampered with.”
Poor Philip died. His widow and four children went to live at a pretty cottage on Malvern Link—upon a hundred pounds a-year, supplied to her by her father-in-law. Mr. Cockermuth added the best part of another hundred. These matters settled, Captain Cockermuth set off on his rovings again, considering himself hardly used by Fate at having his limited income docked of nearly half its value. And yet some more years passed on.
This much has been by way of introduction to what has to come. It was best to give it.
Mr. and Mrs. Jacobson, our neighbours at Dyke Manor, had a whole colony of nephews, what with brothers’ sons and sisters’ sons; of nieces also; batches of them would come over in relays to stay at Elm Farm, which had no children of its own. Samson Dene was the favourite nephew of all; his mother was sister to Mr. Jacobson, his father was dead. Samson Reginald Dene he was christened, but most people called him “Sam.” He had been articled to the gentleman who took to his father’s practice; a lawyer in a village in Oxfordshire. Later, he had gone to a firm in London for a year, had passed, and then came down to his uncle at Elm Farm, asking what he was to do next. For, upon his brother-in-law’s death, Mr. Jacobson had taken upon himself the expenses of Sam, the eldest son.
“Want to know what you are to do now, eh?” cried old Jacobson, who was smoking his evening pipe by the wide fire of the dark-wainscoted, handsome dining-parlour, one evening in February. He was a tall, portly man with a fresh-coloured, healthy face; and not, I dare say, far off sixty years old. “What would you like to do?—what is your own opinion upon it, Sam?”
“I should like to set up in practice for myself, uncle.”
“Oh, indeed! In what quarter of the globe, pray?”
“In Worcester. I have always wished to practise at Worcester. It is the assize town: I don’t care for pettifogging places: one can’t get on in them.”
“You’d like to emerge all at once into a full-blown lawyer there? That’s your notion, is it, Sam?”
Sam made no answer. He knew by the tone his notion was being laughed at.
“No, my lad. When you have been in some good office for another year or two maybe, then you might think about setting-up. The office can be in Worcester if you like.”
“I am hard upon twenty-three, Uncle Jacobson. I have as much knowledge of law as I need.”
“And as much steadiness also, perhaps?” said old Jacobson.
Sam turned as red as the table-cover. He was a frank-looking, slender young fellow of middle height, with fine wavy hair almost a gold colour and worn of a decent length. The present fashion—to be cropped as if you were a prison-bird and to pretend to like it so—was not favoured by gentlemen in those days.
“You may have been acquiring a knowledge of law in London, Sam; I hope you have; but you’ve been kicking up your heels over it. What about those sums of money you’ve more than once got out of your mother?”
Sam’s face was a deeper red than the cloth now. “Did she tell you of it, uncle?” he gasped.
“No, she didn’t; she cares too much for her graceless son to betray him. I chanced to hear of it, though.”
“One has to spend so much in London,” murmured Sam, in lame apology.
“I dare say! In my past days, sir, a young man had to cut his coat according to his cloth. We didn’t rush into all kinds of random games and then go to our fathers or mothers to help us out of them. Which is what you’ve been doing, my gentleman.”
“Does aunt know?” burst out Sam in a fright, as a step was heard on the stairs.
“I’ve not told her,” said Mr. Jacobson, listening—“she is gone on into the kitchen. How much is it that you’ve left owing in London, Sam?”
Sam nearly choked. He did not perceive this was just a random shot: he was wondering whether magic had been at work.
“Left owing in London?” stammered he.
“That’s what I asked. How much? And I mean to know. ’Twon’t be of any use your fencing about the bush. Come! tell it in a lump.”
“Fifty pounds would cover it all, sir,” said Sam, driven by desperation into the avowal.
“I want the truth, Sam.”
“That is the truth, uncle, I put it all down in a list before leaving London; it comes to just under fifty pounds.”
“How could you be so wicked as to contract it?”
“There has not been much wickedness about it,” said Sam, miserably, “indeed there hasn’t. One gets drawn into expenses unconsciously in the most extraordinary manner up in London. Uncle Jacobson, you may believe me or not, when I say that until I added it up, I did not think it amounted to twenty pounds in all.”
“And then you found it to be fifty! How do you propose to pay this?”
“I intend to send it up by instalments, as I can.”
“Instead of doing which, you’ll get into deeper debt at Worcester. If it’s Worcester you go to.”
“I hope not, uncle. I shall do my best to keep out of debt. I mean to be steady.”
Mr. Jacobson filled a fresh pipe, and lighted it with a spill from the mantelpiece. He did not doubt the young fellow’s intentions; he only doubted his resolution.
“You shall go into some lawyer’s office in Worcester for two years, Sam, when we shall see how things turn out,” said he presently. “And, look here, I’ll pay these debts of yours myself, provided you promise me not to get into trouble again. There, no more”—interrupting Sam’s grateful looks—“your aunt’s coming in.”
Sam opened the door for Mrs. Jacobson. A little pleasant-faced woman in a white net cap, with small flat silver curls under it. She carried a small basket lined with blue silk, in which lay her knitting.
“I’ve been looking to your room, my dear, to see that all’s comfortable for you,” she said to Sam, as she sat down by the table and the candles. “That new housemaid of ours is not altogether to be trusted. I suppose you’ve been telling your uncle all about the wonders of London?”
“And something else, too,” put in old Jacobson gruffly. “He wanted to set up in practice for himself at Worcester: off-hand, red-hot!”
“Oh dear!” said Mrs. Jacobson.
“That’s what the boy wanted, nothing less. No. Another year or two’s work in some good house, to acquire stability and experience, and then he may talk about setting up. It will be all for the best, Sam; trust me.”
“Well, uncle, perhaps it will.” It was of no use for him to say perhaps it won’t: he could not help himself. But it was a disappointment.
Mr. Jacobson walked over to Dyke Manor the next day, to consult the Squire as to the best lawyer to place Sam with, himself suggesting their old friend Cockermuth. He described all Sam’s wild ways (it was how he put it) in that dreadful place, London, and the money he had got out of amidst its snares. The Squire took up the matter with his usual hearty sympathy, and quite agreed that no practitioner in the law could be so good for Sam as John Cockermuth.
John Cockermuth proved to be agreeable. He was getting to be an elderly man then, but was active as ever, saving when a fit of the gout took him. He received young Dene in his usual cheery manner, upon the day appointed for his entrance, and assigned him his place in the office next to Mr. Parslet. Parslet had been there more than twenty years; he was, so to say, at the top and tail of all the work that went on in it, but he was not a qualified solicitor. Samson Dene was qualified, and could therefore represent Mr. Cockermuth before the magistrates and what not: of which the old lawyer expected to find the benefit.
“Where are you going to live?” he questioned of Sam that first morning.
“I don’t know yet, sir. Mr. and Mrs. Jacobson are about the town now, I believe, looking for lodgings for me. Of course they couldn’t let me look; they’d think I should be taken in,” added Sam.
“Taken in and done for,” laughed the lawyer. “I should not wonder but Mr. Parslet could accommodate you. Can you, Parslet?”
Mr. Parslet looked up from his desk, his thin cheeks flushing. He was small and slight, with weak brown hair, and had a patient, sad sort of look in his face and in his meek, dark eyes.
James Parslet was one of those men who are said to spoil their own lives. Left alone early, he was looked after by a bachelor uncle, a minor canon of the cathedral, who perhaps tried to do his duty by him in a mild sort of manner. But young Parslet liked to go his own ways, and they were not very good ways. He did not stay at any calling he was put to, trying first one and then another; either the people got tired of him, or he of them. Money (when he got any) burnt a hole in his pocket, and his coats grew shabby and his boots dirty. “Poor Jamie Parslet! how he has spoilt his life” cried the town, shaking its pitying head at him: and thus things went on till he grew to be nearly thirty years of age. Then, to the public astonishment, Jamie pulled up. He got taken on by Lawyer Cockermuth as copying clerk at twenty shillings a-week, married, and became as steady as Old Time. He had been nothing but steady from that day to this, had forty shillings a-week now, instead of twenty, and was ever a meek, subdued man, as if he carried about with him a perpetual repentance for the past, regret for the life that might have been. He lived in Edgar Street, which is close to the cathedral, as every one knows, Edgar Tower being at the top of it. An old gentleman attached to the cathedral had now lodged in his house for ten years, occupying the drawing-room floor; he had recently died, and hence Lawyer Cockermuth’s suggestion.
Mr. Parslet looked up. “I should be happy to, sir,” he said; “if our rooms suited Mr. Dene. Perhaps he would like to look at them?”
“I will,” said Sam. “If my uncle and aunt do not fix on any for me.”
Is there any subtle mesmeric power, I wonder, that influences things unconsciously? Curious to say, at this very moment Mr. and Mrs. Jacobson were looking at these identical rooms. They had driven into Worcester with Sam very early indeed, so as to have a long day before them, and when breakfast was over at the inn, took the opportunity, which they very rarely got, of slipping into the cathedral to hear the beautiful ten-o’clock service. Coming out the cloister way when it was over, and so down Edgar Street, Mrs. Jacobson espied a card in a window with “Lodgings” on it. “I wonder if they would suit Sam?” she cried to her husband. “Edgar Street is a nice, wide, open street, and quiet. Suppose we look at them?”
A young servant-maid, called by her mistress “Sally,” answered the knock. Mrs. Parslet, a capable, bustling woman of ready speech and good manners, came out of the parlour, and took the visitors to the floor above. They liked the rooms and they liked Mrs. Parslet; they also liked the moderate rent asked, for respectable country people in those days did not live by shaving one another; and when it came out that the house’s master had been clerk to Lawyer Cockermuth for twenty years, they settled the matter off-hand, without the ceremony of consulting Sam. Mrs. Jacobson looked upon Sam as a boy still. Mr. Jacobson might have done the same but for the debts made in London.
And all this, you will say, has been yet more explanation; but I could not help it. The real thing begins now, with Sam Dene’s sojourn in Mr. Cockermuth’s office, and his residence in Edgar Street.
The first Sunday of his stay there, Sam went out to attend the morning service in the cathedral, congratulating himself that that grand edifice stood so conveniently near, and looking, it must be confessed, a bit of a dandy, for he had put a little bunch of spring violets into his coat, and “button-holes” were quite out of the common way then. The service began with the Litany, the earlier service of prayers being held at eight o’clock. Sam Dene has not yet forgotten that day, for it is no imaginary person I am telling you of, and never will forget it. The Reverend Allen Wheeler chanted, and the prebendary in residence (Somers Cocks) preached. While wondering when the sermon (a very good one) would be over, and thinking it rather prosy, after the custom of young men, Sam’s roving gaze was drawn to a young lady sitting in the long seat opposite to him on the other side of the choir, whose whole attention appeared to be given to the preacher, to whom her head was turned. It is a nice face, thought Sam; such a sweet expression in it. It really was a nice face, rather pretty, gentle and thoughtful, a patient look in the dark brown eyes. She had on a well-worn dark silk, and a straw bonnet; all very quiet and plain; but she looked very much of a lady. Wonder if she sits there always? thought Sam.
Service over, he went home, and was about to turn the handle of the door to enter (looking another way) when he found it turned for him by some one who was behind and had stretched out a hand to do it. Turning quickly, he saw the same young lady.
“Oh, I beg your pardon,” said Sam, all at sea; “did you wish to come in here?”
“If you please,” she answered—and her voice was sweet and her manner modest.
“Oh,” repeated Sam, rather taken aback at the answer. “You did not want me, did you?”