“On this very day it must be saved; and she will do anything you tell her,” said his mother. “She regards you more than anyone else. If you were to ask her again now, I believe she would accept you this very day. At any rate, do not let those people have the money.”

And yet he had not spoken to Margaret on the subject during the journey, and would now have taken her to the lawyer’s chambers without a word, had she not interrupted him and stopped him.

Nevertheless he had been thinking of his uncle, and his uncle’s will, and his uncle’s money, throughout the morning. He was thinking of it at that moment when she stopped him—thinking how hard it all was, how cruel that those people in the New Road should have had and spent half his uncle’s fortune, and that now the remainder, which at one time had seemed to be near the reach of his own children, should also go to atone for the negligence and fraud of those wretched Rubbs.

We all know with how strong a bias we regard our own side of any question, and he regarded his side in this question with a very strong bias. Nevertheless he had refrained from a word, and would have refrained, had she not stopped him.

When she took hold of him by the coat, he looked for a moment into her face, and thought that in its trouble it was very sweet. She leaned somewhat against him as she spoke, and he wished that she would lean against him altogether. There was about her a quiet power of endurance, and at the same time a comeliness and a womanly softness which seemed to fit her altogether for his wants and wishes. As he looked with his dull face across into the square, no physiognomist would have declared of him that at that moment he was suffering from love, or thinking of a woman that was dear to him. But it was so with him, and the physiognomist, had one been there, would have been wrong. She had now asked him a question, which he was bound to answer in some way:—“What ought I to do, John?”

He turned slowly round and walked with her, away from their destination, round by the south side of the square, and then up along the blank wall on the east side, nearly to the passage into Holborn, and back again all round the enclosed space. She, while she was speaking to him and listening to him, hardly remembered where she was or whither she was going.

“I thought,” said he, in answer to her question, “that you intended to ask Mr Slow’s advice?”

“I didn’t mean to do more than tell him what should be done. He is not a friend, you know, John.”

“It’s customary to ask lawyers their advice on such subjects.”

“I’d rather have yours, John. But, in truth, what I want you to say is, that I am right in doing this,—right in keeping my promise to my brother, and providing for his children.”