ailing faculties, that Sidney grasped his hand and begged him to speak
simply, without effort.

'Have no fear about my understanding you. We've talked a great deal
together, and I know very well what your strongest motives are. Trust
me to sympathise with you.'

'I do! If I hadn't that trust, Sidney, I couldn't have felt the joy I
did when you spoke to me of my Jane. You'll help me to carry out my
plan; you and Jane will; you and Jane! I've got to be such an old man
all at once, as it seems, and I dursn't have waited much longer without
telling you what I had in my mind. See now, I'll go back to when I was
a boy, as far back as I can remember. You know I was born in
Clerkenwell, and I've told you a little now and then of the hard times
I went through. My poor father and mother came out of the country,
thinking to better themselves; instead of that, they found nothing but
cold and hunger, and toil and moil. They were both dead by when I was
between thirteen and fourteen. They died in the same winter--a cruel
winter. I used to go about begging bits of firewood from the
neighbours. There was a man in our house who kept dogs, and I remember
once catching hold of a bit of dirty meat--I can't call it meat--that
one of them had gnawed and left on the stairs; and I ate it, as if I'd
been a dog myself, I was that driven with hunger. Why, I feel the cold
and the hunger at this minute! It was a cruel winter, that, and it left
me alone. I had to get my own living as best I could.

'No teaching. I was nineteen before I could read the signs over shops,
or write my own name. Between nineteen and twenty I got all the
education I ever was to have, paying a man with what I could save out
of my earnings. The blessing was I had health and strength, and with
hard struggling I got into a regular employment. At five-and-twenty I
could earn my pound a week, pretty certain. When it got to five
shillings more, I must needs have a wife to share it with me. My poor
girl came to live with me in a room in Hill Street.

I've never spoken to you of her, but you shall hear it all now, cost me
what it may in the telling. Of course she was out of a poor home, and
she'd known as well as me what it was to go cold and hungry. I
sometimes think, Sidney, I can see a look of her in Jane's face--but
she was prettier than Jane; yes, yes, prettier than Jane. And to think
a man could treat a poor little thing like her the way I did!--you
don't know what sort o