"Has he no children to look after him?"

"No."

She was silent for a moment, as if she were trying to face something that had to be done, and nerving herself to speak. "It isn't for me to know what's best. I never knew any of your people, or saw anyone belonging to you--"

"That's true," he answered, awkwardly. "--Every one has a right to his own history, and I don't hold with giving it out just for the sake of talking. Many lives have been upset by things there was no need to tell--" She stopped again, and then went on bravely. "But what I am coming to is that if your brother is ill and has nobody but his wife, who isn't any good, you might like to go out to him?"

"To go out to him!" The thought made his heart leap. The quiet years had ranged themselves round him lately like the walls of a prison--a friendly prison, in which he was well content--but it seemed as if he had suddenly come in sight of a door-way through which he might go outwards for a little while and come back when he had seen once more the unforgotten tracks.

"It might comfort him," she went on without flinching. "And you wouldn't be more than a year gone, I expect. It must be terribly dull for you here sometimes. I've often thought how good you've been."

He put his hand tenderly on her arm while he answered, "All the goodness has been yours."

She turned her eyes to the window lest he should see the happiness in them, for she had always been half ashamed of loving him as she did--a staid woman of middle age, with homely matters to concern her. "I don't see that I have done anything out of the way," she said.

"Did it never occur to you that you have not seen anyone belonging to me, and that really you know nothing about me? I was a stranger when I came, and you took me in."

"One knows a good deal without being told. I've always felt that your family was what it should be; and there's been all your life here to judge you by."

He looked at her and felt like an impostor. He knew that the fact of his father having been a lord, or his brother being one now, would not uplift her as it would a vulgar woman. On the contrary, it would probably be an embarrassment to her, and a reason for being silent regarding them, since she would think it unlikely that people who were her superiors in education and knowledge of the world 

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