"I am a very old man, Mary Anne," he repeated plaintively. But Mary Anne Kepp could not think him old. To her eyes he must for ever appear the incarnation of all that is elegant and distinguished. He was the first gentleman she had ever seen. Mrs. Kepp had given shelter to other lodgers who had called themselves gentlemen, and who had been pompous and grandiose of manner in their intercourse with the widow and her daughter; but O, what pitiful lacquered counterfeits, what Brummagem paste they had been, compared to the real gem! Mary Anne Kepp had seen varnished boots before the humble flooring of her mother's dwelling was honoured by the tread of Horatio Paget, but what clumsy vulgar boots, and what awkward plebeian feet had worn them! The lodger's slim white hands and arched instep, the patrician curve of his aquiline nose, the perfect grace of his apparel, the high-bred modulation of his courteous accents,—all these had impressed Mary Anne's tender little heart so much the more because of his poverty and loneliness. That such a man should be forgotten and deserted—that such a man should be poor and lonely, seemed so cruel a chance to the simple maiden: and then when illness overtook him, and invested him with a supreme claim upon her tenderness and pity,—then the innocent girl lavished all the treasures of a compassionate heart upon the ruined gentleman. She had no thought of fee or reward; she knew that her mother's lodger was miserably poor, and that his payments had become more and more irregular week by week and month by month. She had no consciousness of the depth of feeling that rendered her so gentle a nurse; for her life was a busy one, and she had neither time nor inclination for any morbid brooding upon her own feelings.

She protested warmly against the Captain's lamentation respecting his age.

"The idear of any gentleman calling hisself old at fifty!" she said—and Horatio shuddered at the supererogatory "r" and the "hisself," though they proceeded from the lips of his consoler;—"you've got many, many years before you yet, sir, please God," she added piously; "and there's good friends will come forward yet to help you, I make no doubt."

Captain Paget shook his head peevishly.