As he had finished his toilet in Bessie's room there was nothing now for him to do except to give an extra twist to his cravat, run his fingers through his brown hair and then he was ready for the dining-room, where he found Bessie alone. As a matter of course, Dorothy had gone to Bessie and told her of the exchange, which delighted her far more than it did her mistress.
"Mr. Jerrold in that cold, dreary room!" Bessie exclaimed. "Oh, Dorothy, why did you allow it, and what must he think of us?"
"I could not help myself, darling, for he would have his way," Dorothy replied. "He was that set on the cold room that you couldn't move him a jot. His breathing apparatus is out of killer; he has the tisick awful and can't breathe in a warm room. I shall give him some cubebs to smoke to-morrow. And don't you worry; he won't freeze. I'll put a bag of hot water in the bed. He is a very nice young gentleman, if he is an American."
Bessie knew she could not help herself, but there was a troubled look on her face when Grey came in, and, approaching her as she stood by the fire, made some casual remark about the unusual severity of the weather for the season.
"Yes, it is very cold," she said, adding quickly, as she looked up at him: "Oh, Mr. Jerrold, Dorothy has told me, and I am so sorry. You do not know how cold that north chamber is, and we cannot warm it if we try, the chimney smokes so badly. You will be so uncomfortable there. You might let the fire go down in m--, in the other room, if the heat affects you. Dorothy says you suffer greatly with asthma."
"Yes--no," Grey replied, confusedly, scarcely willing to commit himself again to the asthma. "I shall not mind the cold at all. I am accustomed to it. You must remember I come from the land of ice and snow. You have no idea what blizzards America is capable of getting up, and ought to hear how the wind can howl and the snow drift about an old farm-house in a rocky pasture land, which I would give much to see to-night."
There was a tone of regret in his rich, musical voice, and forgetting that Neil had said he was from Boston. Bessie said to him: "Is that farm-house your home?"
"Oh, no; my home proper is in Boston," he answered her, "but I have spent some of my happiest days in that house, and the memory of it and the dear woman who lives there is the sweetest of my life, and the saddest, too," he added, slowly; for, right in Bessie's blue eyes, looking at him so steadily, he seemed to see the hidden grave, and for a moment all the old bitter shame and humiliation which had once weighed him down so heavily, and which, naturally, the lapse of years had tended to lighten, came back to him in the presence of this young girl who seemed so inextricably mixed up with everything pertaining to his past.