“I have indeed felt it so.”

“Then you will the sooner pardon my not telling you—­what you never asked, and I was only too ready to forget—­that we are not equals—­ that is, society would not regard us as such, and I doubt if even you yourself would wish us to be friends.”

“Why not?”

“Because you are a gentlewoman, and I am a tradesman.”

She sat—­the eyelashes drooping over her flushed cheeks—­perfectly silent.  John’s voice grew firmer, prouder; there was no hesitation now.

“My calling is, as you will hear at Norton Bury, that of a tanner.  I am apprentice to Abel Fletcher, Phineas’s father.”

“Mr. Fletcher!” She looked up at him, with a mingled look of kindliness and pain.

“Ay, Phineas is a little less beneath your notice than I am.  He is rich, and has been well educated; I have had to educate myself.  I came to Norton Bury six years ago—­a beggar-boy.  No, not quite so bad as that, for I never begged.  I either worked or starved.”

The earnestness, the passion of his tone made Miss March lift her eyes, but they fell again.

“Yes, Phineas found me starving in an alley.  We stood in the rain opposite the mayor’s house.  A little girl—­you know her, Miss March—­ came to the door and threw out to me a bit of bread.”

Now indeed she started.  “You!  Was that you?”

John paused, and his whole manner changed into softness as he resumed.

“I never forgot that little girl.  Many a time when I was inclined to do wrong, she kept me right—­the remembrance of her sweet face and her kindness.”

That face was pressed against the sofa where she sat.  Miss March was all but weeping.

“I am glad to have met her again,” he went on, “and glad to have been able to do her some small good in return for the infinite good she once did me.  I shall bid her farewell now, at once, and altogether.”

A quick, involuntary turn of the hidden face seemed to ask him “Why?”

“Because,” John said, “the world says we are not equals; and it would be neither for Miss March’s honour nor mine did I try to force upon it the truth—­which I may prove openly one day—­that we are equals.”

Miss March looked up at him—­it were hard to say with what expression, of pleasure, of pride, or simple astonishment; perhaps a mingling of all; then her eyelids fell.  Her left arm was hanging over the sofa, the scar being visible enough.  John took the hand, and pressed his lips to the place where the wound had been.

“Poor little hand—­blessed little hand!” he murmured.  “May God bless it evermore!”

III.—­The Rise of John Halifax

After John Halifax had returned to Norton Bury he was seized with fever, and for a time his recovery seemed doubtful.  In his delirium he called aloud for Ursula, and dreamed that she had come to sit with him, asking him to live for her sake.  Phineas, in his anxiety for his friend, brought Ursula to him, and the dream came true, for she did ask him to live for her sake.