“Ah! you were fortunate.  I lost my mother, sir, when I was but eight years old.”

“Oh dear, that was a bad job,” said Henry brusquely but kindly.

“A very bad job,” said Grace, smiling; but the next moment she suddenly turned her fair head away and tears stole down her cheeks.

Henry looked very sorry, and Jael, without moving, looked at Grace, and opened those sluices, her eyes, and two big drops of sympathy rolled down her comely face in a moment.

That day, when young Little shut the street-door of “Woodbine Villa” and stepped into the road, a sort of dull pain seemed to traverse his chest.  It made his heart ache a little, this contrast of the sweet society he had left and the smoky town toward which he now turned his face.  He seemed to be ejected from Paradise for the next five days.  It was Monday yet he wished the next day was Saturday, and the intervening period could be swept away, so that he might be entering that soft Paradise instead of leaving it.

And this sentiment, once rooted, grew rapidly in an aspiring nature, and a heart that had never yet entertained a serious passion.  Now the fair head that bowed over the work so near him, the lovely hand he had so often to direct, and almost to guide, and all the other perfections of mind and body this enchanting girl possessed, crept in at his admiring eyes, and began to steal into his very veins, and fill him with soft complacency.  His brusque manner dissolved away, and his voice became low and soft, whenever he was in her delicious presence.  He spoke softly to Jael even, if Grace was there.  The sturdy workman was enthralled.

Often he wondered at himself.  Sometimes he felt alarmed at the strength of his passion and the direction it had taken.

“What,” said he, “have I flirted with so many girls in my own way of life, and come away heart-whole, and now to fall in love with a gentlewoman, who would bid her footman show me the door if she knew of my presumption!”

But these misgivings could neither cure him nor cow him.  Let him only make money, and become a master instead of a workman, and then he would say to her, “I don’t value birth myself, but if you do, why, I am not come of workpeople.”

He traced a plan with workmanlike precision:—­Profound discretion and self-restraint at “Woodbine Villa:”  restless industry and stern self-denial in Hillsborough.

After his day’s work he used to go straight to his mother.  She gave him a cup of tea, and then they had their chat; and after that the sexes were inverted, so to speak:  the man carved fruit, and flowers, and dead woodcocks, the woman read the news and polities of the day, and the essays on labor and capital, and any other articles not too flimsy to bear reading aloud to a man whose time was coin. (There was a free library in Hillsborough, and a mechanic could take out standard books and reviews.) Thus they passed the evening hours agreeably, and usefully too, for Henry sucked in knowledge like a leech, and at the same time carved things that sold well in London.  He had a strong inclination to open his heart about Miss Carden.  Accordingly, one evening he said, “She lost her mother when she was a child.”