Jane tried to regard the man for a moment.  Her cheeks flushed with confusion.  Again she looked at him, and the colour rapidly faded.  In her eyes was a strange light of painfully struggling recollection.  She turned to Clem, and read her countenance with distress.

‘Well, I’m quite sure I should never have known you, Janey,’ said Snowdon, advancing.  ‘Don’t you remember your father?’

Yes; as soon as consciousness could reconcile what seemed impossibilities Jane had remembered him.  She was not seven years old when he forsook her, and a life of anything but orderly progress had told upon his features.  Nevertheless Jane recognised the face she had never had cause to love, recognised yet more certainly the voice which carried her back to childhood.  But what did it all mean?  The shock was making her heart throb as it was wont to do before her fits of illness.  She looked about her with dazed eyes.

‘Sit down, sit down,’ said her father, not without a note of genuine feeling.  ’It’s been a bit too much for you—­like something else was for me just now.  Put some water in that glass, Clem; a drop of this will do her good.’

The smell of what was offered her proved sufficient to restore Jane; she shook her head and put the glass away.  After an uncomfortable silence, during which Joseph dragged his feet about the floor, Clem remarked: 

’He wants you to take him home to see your grandfather, Jane.  There’s been reasons why he couldn’t go before.  Hadn’t you better go at once, Jo?’

Jane rose and waited whilst her father assumed his hat and drew on a new pair of gloves.  She could not look at either husband or wife.  Presently she found herself in the street, walking without consciousness of things in the homeward direction.

‘You’ve grown up a very nice, modest girl, Jane,’ was her father’s first observation.  ’I can see your grandfather has taken good care of you.’

He tried to speak as if the situation were perfectly simple.  Jane could find no reply.

‘I thought it was better,’ he continued, in the same matter-of-fact voice, ’not to see either of you till this marriage of mine was over.  I’ve had a great deal of trouble in life—­I’ll tell you all about it some day, my dear—­and I wanted just to settle myself before—­I dare say you’ll understand what I mean.  I suppose your grandfather has often spoken to you about me?’

‘Not very often, father,’ was the murmured answer.

’Well, well; things’ll soon be set right.  I feel quite proud of you, Janey; I do, indeed.  And I suppose you just keep house for him, eh?’

‘I go to work as well.’

‘What?  You go to work?  How’s that, I wonder?’

‘Didn’t Miss Peckover tell you?’

Joseph laughed.  The girl could not grasp all these astonishing facts at once, and the presence of her father made her forget who Miss Peckover had become.