“Well enough?  Of course I am.  But why not take a waterman from the stairs here?”

“’Twill cost less to walk and hire a boat at Blackwall, if necessary.  Your father could give me very little money, Charles.  We seem to be as poorly off as ever.”

“And this uncle Annesley—­” he began, but paused with a glance at his mother, whose face had suddenly grown hot.  “What sort of a man is he?”

“My boy,” she said with an effort, “I must not be ashamed to tell my child what I am not ashamed to hope.  He is rich:  he once promised to do much for Emmy and Sukey, and these promises came to nothing.  But now that his wife is dead and he comes home with neither chick nor child, I see no harm in praying that his heart may be moved towards his sister’s children.  At least I shall be frank with him and hide not my hope, let him treat it as he will.”  She was silent for a moment.  “Are all women unscrupulous when they fight for their children?  They cannot all be certain, as I am, that their children were born for greatness:  and yet, I wonder sometimes—­” She wound up with a smile which held something of a playful irony, but more of sadness.

“Jacky could not come with you?”

“No, and he writes bitterly about it.  He is tied to Oxford—­by lack of pence, again.”

By this time Charles had slipped on his jacket, and the pair stepped out into the streets and set their faces eastward.  Mrs. Wesley was cockney-bred and delighted in the stir and rush of life.  She, the mother of many children, kept a well-poised figure and walked with the elastic step of a maid; and as she went she chatted, asking a score of shrewd questions about Westminster—­the masters, the food, the old dormitory in which Charles slept, the new one then rising to replace it; breaking off to recognise some famous building, or to pause and gaze after a company of his Majesty’s guards.  Her own masterful carriage and unembarrassed mode of speech—­“as if all London belonged to her,” Charles afterwards described it—­drew the stares of the passers-by; stares which she misinterpreted, for in the gut of the Strand, a few paces beyond Somerset House, she suddenly twirled the lad about and “Bless us, child, your eye’s enough to frighten the town!  ’Tis to be hoped brother Sam has not turned Quaker in India; or that Sally the cook-maid has a beefsteak handy.”

Mr. Matthew Wesley, apothecary and by courtesy “surgeon,” to whose house in Johnson’s Court, Fleet Street, they presently swerved aside, had not returned from his morning’s round of visits.  He was a widower and took his meals irregularly.  But Sally had two covers laid, with a pot of freshly drawn porter beside each; and here, after Charles’s eye had been attended to and the swelling reduced, they ate and drank and rested for half an hour before resuming their walk.