Old Oliver laid aside his pipe, and rested his worn face upon his hands, while the heavy tears came slowly and painfully to his eyes, and trickled down his withered cheeks.  His joy had fled, and his unmingled gladness had faded quite away.  He was a very poor, very old man; and the little child was very, very young.  What would become of them both, alone in London?

He did not know whether it was a voice speaking within himself in his own heart, or words whispered very softly into his ear; but he heard a low, quiet, still, small voice, which said, “Even to your old age I am he, and even to hoar hairs I will carry you:  I have made, and I will bear; even I will carry, and will deliver you.”  And old Oliver answered, with a sob, “Yes, Lord, yes!”

CHAPTER VII.

The Prince of life.

In the new life which had now fairly begun for Oliver, it was partly as he had foreseen; he was apt to forget many things, and he had a fretting consciousness of this forgetfulness.  When he was in the house playing with Dolly, or reading to her, the shop altogether slipped away from his memory, and he was only recalled to it by the loud knocking or shouting of some customer in it.  On the other hand, when he was sitting behind the counter looking for news from India in the papers, news in which he was already profoundly concerned, though it was impossible that Susan could yet have reached it, he grew so absorbed, that he did not know how the time was passing by, and both he and his little grand-daughter were hungry before he had thought of getting ready any meal.  He tried all kinds of devices for strengthening his failing memory; but in vain.  He even forgot that he did forget; and when Dolly was laughing and frolicking about him he grew a child again, and felt himself the happiest man in London.

The person who took upon himself the heaviest weight of anxiety and responsibility about Dolly was Tony, who began to make it his daily custom to pass by the house at the hour when old Oliver ought to be going for his morning papers; and if he found no symptom of life about the place, he did not leave off kicking and butting at the shop-door until the owner appeared.  It was very much the same thing at night, when the time for shutting up came; though it generally happened now that the boy was paying his friends an evening visit, and was therefore at hand to put up the shutters for Oliver.  Tony could not keep away from the place.  Though he felt a boy’s contemptuous pity for the poor old man’s declining faculties as regarded business, he had a very high veneration for his learning.  Nothing pleased him better than to sit upon the old box near the door, his elbows on his knees, and his chin upon his hands, while Oliver read aloud, with Dolly upon his knee, her curly hair and small pretty features making a strange contrast to his white head and withered, hollow face.