, now all ablaze with flowers.
"You must lie down and rest till dinner. I ordered it at seven to-night,
I will send you up some tea at once. I hope you will be comfortable and
ask for what you want," Bessie said, as she flitted about the room,
anxious to make her guest feel at home.
He was very tired, and sank down upon the inviting looking lounge,
saying as he did so:
"Oh, Bessie, you do not know how glad I am to be here with you and Grey;
nor yet how it affects me. I am not always as bad as this. I shall be
better by and by. God bless you."
He drew her face down to his and kissed it fervently; then she went
softly out and left him there alone.
Poor Neil! he was greatly to be pitied. His life in India had been a
failure from first to last. He had no talent for business, and as he
thoroughly disliked the business he was in, it was not strange that he
was dismissed by his employers within six months after his arrival in
Calcutta. Then he tried something else, and still something else, and
was just beginning to feel some interest in his work and to hope for
success, when a malarial fever seized upon him and reduced him to a mere
wreck of his former self.
Then it was that his father died suddenly at Stoneleigh, and as it
seemed desirable that some one should attend to what little there was
left to him, Neil returned to England, going first to Wales and then to
London, where he took the very lodgings which Bessie had occupied years
before, and at which he had rebelled as dingy and second-class. How
sorry he was now that he had wounded Bessie so unnecessarily, and how
well he understood from actual experience the poverty which could only
afford such apartments as Mrs. Buncher's! Except the little his father
had left him he had scarcely a shilling in the world, and the future
looked very dreary and desolate on that first evening in April, when the
once fashionable and fastidious Neil McPherson took possession of his
cheerless rooms on Abingdon Road, and threw himself down upon the
hair-cloth sofa with an ache in his head and an ache in his heart as he
thought of all the past, and remembered the sweet-faced girl who had
once been there, and who had left there an atmosphere of peace and
quiet, which reconciled him at last to his surroundings.
Of all his large circle of acquaintance in London, there was not one
whom he cared to meet, and so he staid mostly in his room, only going
out at unfashionable hours for a s
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