What could I do to reassure my darling (I considered then) and show her that I had no such feelings?  Well!  I could only be as brisk and busy as possible, and that I had tried to be all along.  However, as Caddy’s illness had certainly interfered, more or less, with my home duties—­though I had always been there in the morning to make my guardian’s breakfast, and he had a hundred times laughed and said there must be two little women, for his little woman was never missing—­I resolved to be doubly diligent and gay.  So I went about the house humming all the tunes I knew, and I sat working and working in a desperate manner, and I talked and talked, morning, noon, and night.

And still there was the same shade between me and my darling.

“So, Dame Trot,” observed my guardian, shutting up his book one night when we were all three together, “so Woodcourt has restored Caddy Jellyby to the full enjoyment of life again?”

“Yes,” I said; “and to be repaid by such gratitude as hers is to be made rich, guardian.”

“I wish it was,” he returned, “with all my heart.”

So did I too, for that matter.  I said so.

“Aye!  We would make him as rich as a Jew if we knew how.  Would we not, little woman?”

I laughed as I worked and replied that I was not sure about that, for it might spoil him, and he might not be so useful, and there might be many who could ill spare him.  As Miss Flite, and Caddy herself, and many others.

“True,” said my guardian.  “I had forgotten that.  But we would agree to make him rich enough to live, I suppose?  Rich enough to work with tolerable peace of mind?  Rich enough to have his own happy home and his own household gods—­and household goddess, too, perhaps?”

That was quite another thing, I said.  We must all agree in that.

“To be sure,” said my guardian.  “All of us.  I have a great regard for Woodcourt, a high esteem for him; and I have been sounding him delicately about his plans.  It is difficult to offer aid to an independent man with that just kind of pride which he possesses.  And yet I would be glad to do it if I might or if I knew how.  He seems half inclined for another voyage.  But that appears like casting such a man away.”

“It might open a new world to him,” said I.

“So it might, little woman,” my guardian assented.  “I doubt if he expects much of the old world.  Do you know I have fancied that he sometimes feels some particular disappointment or misfortune encountered in it.  You never heard of anything of that sort?”

I shook my head.

“Humph,” said my guardian.  “I am mistaken, I dare say.”  As there was a little pause here, which I thought, for my dear girl’s satisfaction, had better be filled up, I hummed an air as I worked which was a favourite with my guardian.

“And do you think Mr. Woodcourt will make another voyage?” I asked him when I had hummed it quietly all through.