Three days passed before Holdsworth saw Nelly again. He then, from his window, beheld her playing on the pavement opposite with the horse and cart he had given her.

He called, and she came running over to him gleefully at once.

Mrs. Parrot was despatched to request Mrs. Conway’s leave that Nelly might stop to tea with Mr. Hampden, and returned to say that “the little gal might, with the greatest of pleasure.”

Again and again Nelly was summoned out of the road by Holdsworth, sometimes of a morning, sometimes of an afternoon, when he could see her. The little creature soon learnt to resist all her mother’s suggestions that she should play in the back garden; she liked the pavement in the road, especially the pavement opposite Holdsworth’s lodgings, and with an air of inscrutable mystery would keep a sharp look-out for Holdsworth, while she feigned to be absorbed in her toy. Ah, the artfulness of some little girls! But then there were always gingerbread and cakes for her in the miraculous cupboard in the corner of Holdsworth’s room; and the temptation to obtain these luxuries, and to evade the slice of bread and cup of thin milk and water which formed her evening meal at home, was sometimes powerful enough to send her toddling out of the back garden, where her mother placed her, into the road, actually unobserved by mamma, who, imagining that she still played in the garden, would be astonished by Mrs. Parrot coming across and saying that Miss Nelly was with Mr. Hampden, and please might she stop to tea.

Often, if Holdsworth had the good fortune to see his little girl in the morning, or early in the afternoon, he would put on his hat, and leaving word with Mrs. Parrot to tell Mrs. Conway, should she ask, that he had taken Nelly for a walk, clasp the child’s hand and stroll with her into the town.

Nelly enjoyed these rambles hugely. Their two figures contrasted strangely, and many a woman’s eyes would follow them, because the measured step, the thoughtful brow, the sunken face of the man, and the golden-haired child at his side, with her bright young face and big eyes drinking in the sights and processions of the streets, and little twinkling feet, tripping so fleetly and dancingly along, that one would say she held his hand to prevent herself flying away, formed a picture which a woman’s heart would love to contemplate for its prettiness.

They would sometimes turn out of the hot streets, when Nelly’s listless glance would show her weary at last of the splendours of the toy-shops (before which they regularly stopped) and wander to the river’s side; and there, in the shadow of trees, Holdsworth would rest himself, while Nelly cleared the space around her of all the daisies and buttercups she could find.

These were hours of deep and calm enjoyment to Holdsworth, who, until the chimes of the town clocks warned him to rise, would lie, with his head supported on his elbow, that his face might be close to Nelly’s that he might catch every fluctuating expression that made her eyes an endless series of sweet signs, that he might hear every faltering syllable that fell from her lips.

Soft and cool were the sounds the river made, as its gentle tide gurgled a secret music among the high rushes, or rippled round stumps of trees or projections of stone lodged in the bank. Winged insects flashed many-coloured lights upon the eye as they swept from shadow to shadow, parted by a rivulet of sunshine falling through the openings in the trees. Now and again a trout leaped with a pleasant and lazy splash. From the shores opposite, behind the trees, came the smell of the warm red clover, mingled with the multitudinous hum of bees. Afar, at a bend of the stream, an angler might stand watching his quill, with his head and shoulders mirrored in the clear water—so exquisite the counterfeit that one might easily make a parable out of it, and sermonise slumberously, as befitted the drowsy influence of the hot day, on those illusions of life which mock the heart they mislead in its search after truth.

Once, when Holdsworth was taking Nelly home, after a long rest on the river’s edge, he met Mr. Conway, who stared very hard, but passed on without addressing the child. Nelly drew close to Holdsworth when she saw the man.

Holdsworth knew Conway perfectly well by sight now. The dentist had repeatedly passed the window at which Holdsworth stationed himself on the look-out for Nelly; and of late, it might have been noticed, he would glance with no unfriendly expression towards Mrs. Parrot’s old-fashioned house.

His walk, when he did not actually reel, as he very often did, might have been studied with some disgust as an illustration of character. It was a species of gliding movement, such as a man might be supposed to adopt, whose self-abasement he himself holds irrevocable, and who has made up his mind no longer to walk, but to sneak through life. The influence of importunate creditors might be marked in the quick, furtive glancing of the eye, that wandered from side to side and challenged every individual it rested upon. One half-dulled perception of his social obligations might yet linger; or perhaps it was an innate love of dress which, from being a vice in prosperity, would degenerate into a kind of sickly virtue in poverty, that gave him an indescribable air of seedy jauntiness, tilting his soiled hat, swathing his neck in a bright kerchief, and furnishing his body with a small-waisted frock-coat.

It was very natural that Mrs. Parrot’s lodger should be somewhat of a mystery to him. Having no liking for children himself, but, on the contrary, a rather decided aversion to them, he could not understand what this Mr. Hampden saw in Nelly to make him so prodigal in his gifts, so eager for her society.

Who was he? As Mrs. Parrot made a point of avoiding him, he could not very well question her about her lodger; but since she was the only person in Hanwitch who was likely to know anything about him, he got one of her tradesmen to cross-examine her. But this ruse resulted in little. All that Mrs. Parrot could tell was, that her lodger’s name was Hampden, that he was a gentleman with rather queer habits, and that he seemed to have lots of money.

It was something to find out that he had lots of money.

On the strength of this Mr. Conway suddenly discovered Nelly to be a very interesting child, and never seemed more pleased than when she was over the way at Mrs. Parrot’s.

The fact was, the dentist had an idea. It was a small, contemptible, tricky idea, such as poverty and drink would beget between them. He kept it to himself and waited.

Dolly, of course, was deeply gratified by Mr. Hampden’s affection for her child. At first her curiosity had been morbidly excited by this stranger. Something there had been in his voice which stirred memory to its centre: and the strange, baffling, elusive thoughts it had induced kept her spiritless and nervous for some days after the interview between them. Twice she dreamed of the husband she believed dead. The dream, in both instances, was perplexed, and left no determinable impression; but its iteration increased her melancholy, and made memory painful and importunate.

She accounted for her feelings by referring them to the recollections which had been abruptly renewed—dragged, so to say, from the grave in which they lay hidden; and this clue being put into her hand, left her easy as to the raison d’Être of her depression.

Indeed, no suspicion of this stranger’s identity with Holdsworth could have entered her mind without being instantly followed by conviction. The thought never occurred to her: how could it? She believed him dead, and the permanent habit of this belief took the quality of established proof of his death.

But even if she had doubted his death; if ever she had cherished the hope that he would one day return to her—a hope that she had held to passionately for awhile, but which had dropped dead out of her heart when she gave her hand to Mr. Conway—no memory that she had of him would admit the possibility of the change that had been wrought in him.

There was a sign to be made—a look, a smile, a whisper—which would flash perception into her, knit into compact form the thoughts which his voice had troubled, and confess him her HUSBAND, though hollow-faced and wan; though stricken as with age; though presenting the ineffaceable memorials of grievous torture.

But, until this sign should be made, he must be a stranger to her; a puzzle, perhaps; a man of eccentric habits, and of an odd and striking aspect—but not her husband.

Nor, strange as his suddenly-acquired affection for Nelly might seem to others, could it come to her as a surprise. The mother’s vanity would easily account for the pleasure her little daughter gave to the lonely man.

Once, when Mrs. Parrot, meeting her in the road, said that “It did seem strange that a man an’ a child, as had niver set eyes on each other before, should love each other in the way Mr. Hampden and Miss Nelly did:” Dolly answered, “Yes; but though I am her mother, yet I must say that Nelly is a pretty and very winning child, and there is nothing uncommon in strangers taking a fancy to children.”

No; that was quite true, Mrs. Parrot answered; and told a story of a rich lady admiring a little beggar girl in the street; and how the rich lady took the wench into her carrich, and got the parients’ leaf to adopt her; and how the beggar girl came into the rich lady’s fortin, and grew up into a stately an’ ’aughty woman, an’ married a lord, she did, as was beknown to many.

“It ’ud be a comfortin’ thing to you, ma’am, don’t you think, if Mr. Hampden was to adopt your little gal. It ’ud be a relief to your feelings, wouldn’t it?” Mrs. Parrot said.

If some half-formed thought, bearing a resemblance to Mrs. Parrot’s view, had flitted across Dolly’s mind, let us not marvel. Never was her mood sadder, never was her secret grief sharper, than when her child’s future formed the subject of her thoughts. Who would give Nelly a home if she died? Who would love the little thing; rear her in the knowledge of God, of her broken-hearted mother, of her poor drowned father?

“I could not part with her, Mrs. Parrot; she is the only link that binds me to bygone happy days. I could not spare her. My life would be too lonely for me to support it. But I often pray to God that she may find a friend—such a friend as I am sure Mr. Hampden would make her—when I am dead.”

This hope—that Mr. Hampden would prove that friend—was the real source of the comfort that filled her heart each time she saw her little girl trip across to Mrs. Parrot’s house.

She seldom saw Holdsworth. Sometimes she thought he avoided her. Twice, when she was leaving or returning to her house, she saw him in the porch, and each time he hastily withdrew, when she would have crossed over to speak to him. On rare occasions she met him coming from the town. Once he raised his hat and passed on: once she went up to him to thank him for his kindness to Nelly. He answered her hurriedly, speaking with an effort, and terminated the interview almost abruptly by bowing and leaving her. Then, again, his voice affected her powerfully. She stopped and looked after him; and went on her way, brooding, with a little frown of anxious, painful thought.

On his part, the weight of his secret, when they thus met, face to face, was insupportable. The wild rush of impulse combated by inflexible resolution, created a conflict in his breast beyond his capacity of endurance. He could not have prolonged a conversation with her. It was shocking to feel himself unknown; it was shocking to feel that he might betray himself. But he could watch her from his window. He knew now her hours of going and coming, and would station himself behind the curtain, and follow her with exquisite tenderness in his eyes, and sadness, crueller than words can tell, in his heart.

How was this all to end?

Here was the thought that now tormented him. Six weeks had passed since he came to Hanwitch. He was living frugally, indeed; and of the money he had brought with him from Australia a large portion still remained. But his few hundred pounds made a very slender capital; and when they were spent what then?

He knew very well that he could return to Sydney, that Mr. Sherman would welcome him back, and reinstate him in his old post. But the mere thought of leaving England was misery to him. Suppose, under any plea, he obtained Dolly’s leave to take Nelly with him, could he part from Dolly? He might never see her again. Then let him think of her companion; of the sordid, hungry life he knew she was leading—knew, though he could devise no expedient for relieving her, that might not be resented as an affront and lose him Nelly’s companionship.

He would rather have her in her grave than leave her as she was.

If urgent distress should ever come upon her, he would be at hand to succour and support her. And that such urgent distress must come sooner or later—that the day sooner or later must arrive when she and her child would be without a home, he had but to watch the maundering man who passed his windows backwards and forwards day after day, aimless, sodden, and growing shabbier and shabbier every week in his appearance, to know.