“Certainly not,” her father answered promptly.  “I think you will be quite right in getting away from this dingy hole as quick as you can.”

“It is not for that.  But I have promised to return directly I was free to do so.”

“And you go back to Hampshire?  To what part of Hampshire?”

Marian told him the name of the place where she was living.  He wrote the address in his pocket-book, and was especially careful that it should be correctly written, as to the name of the nearest town, and in all other particulars.

“I may have to write to you, or to come to you, perhaps,” he said.  “It’s as well to be prepared for the contingency.”

After this Mr. Nowell sent out for a “Railway Guide,” in order to give his daughter all necessary information about the trains for Malsham.  There was a tolerably fast train that left Waterloo at seven in the morning, and Marian decided upon going by that.  She had to spend the evening alone with her father while Mrs. Mitchin kept watch in the dismal chamber upstairs.  Mr. Nowell asked his daughter’s permission to light his cigar, and having obtained it, sat smoking moodily all the evening, staring into the fire, and very rarely addressing his companion, who had taken a Bible out of her travelling-bag, and was reading those solemn, chapters which best harmonised with her feelings at this moment; thinking as she read of the time when her guardian and benefactor lay in his last calm rest, and she had vainly tried to find comfort in the same words, and had found herself staring blankly at the sacred page, with eyes that were dry and burning, and to which there came no merciful relief from tears.

Her father glanced at her askance now and then from his arm-chair by the fire, as she sat by the little round table looking down at her book, the light of the candles shining full upon her pensive face.  He looked at her with no friendliness in his eyes, but with that angry sparkle which had grown almost habitual to them of late, since the world had gone ill with him.  After one of those brief stolen looks, a strange smile crept over his face.  He was thinking of a little speech of Shakespeare’s Richard about his nephew, the youthful Prince of Wales: 

    So young, so wise, they say do ne’er live long.

“How pious she is!” he said to himself with a diabolical sneer.  “Did the half-pay Captain teach her that, I wonder? or does church-going, and psalm-singing, and Bible-reading come natural to all women?  I know my mother was good at it, and my wife too.  She used to fly to her Bible as a man flies to dram-drinking, or his pipe, when things go wrong.”

He got tired of his cigar at last, and went out into the shop, where he began to question Mr. Tulliver as to the extent and value of the stock-in-trade, and upon other details of the business; to all of which inquiries the shopman replied in a suspicious and grudging spirit, giving his questioner the smallest possible amount of information.