Everything smiled and brightened before him; the organ-grinder stopped and found out from poor Parsons’s perpetual gesticulations that pennies were not to be expected; and something soft and tranquil and serene seemed to steal into the room and envelop the two, who were betrothing themselves over again, or so they thought. “Papa says you are to come to Fernwood. You must come and let me nurse you,” Kate whispered in his ear. “That would be too sweet,” John whispered back again; and then she opened the note to his mother and wrote a little postscript to it, with his arm round her, and his poor scarred face over her shoulder watching every word as she wrote it. “He looks so frightful,” Kate wrote, “you never saw any one so hideous, dear mamma, or such a darling [don’t shake my arm, John]. I never knew how nice he was, nor how fond I was of him, till now.” This was how the day ended which had been begun in such misery; for it was nearly dusk when Kate left him with the faithful Parsons. “Indeed you shall not come with me,” she said, “you who ought to be in bed----” but, notwithstanding this protest and all his scars, he went with her till they came within sight of the bank, where the carriage was standing. Of course it did him harm, and the doctor was very angry; but what did John, in the delight of his heart, care for that? CHAPTER XVIII. A day or two after this visit John found himself at Fernwood. It was not perhaps a judicious step for any of them. He came still suffering--and, above all, still marked by his sufferings--among a collection of strangers to whom the bank, and the fire, and the value of the papers he had saved, were of the smallest possible consequence, and who were intensely mystified by his heterogeneous position as at once the betrothed of Kate Crediton and a clerk in her father’s bank. Then there was a sense of embarrassment between him and Mr Crediton which it was impossible either to ignore or to make an end of--John had done so much for the man who was so unwilling to grant him anything in return. He had not only saved the banker’s daughter, but his papers, perhaps his very habitation, and the bulk of all he had in the world, and Mr Crediton was confused by such a weight of obligations. “I must take care he don’t save my life next,” he said to himself; but, notwithstanding this weight of gratitude which he owed, he was not in the least changed in his reluctance to pay. To give his child as salvage-money was a thing he could not bear to think of; and when he looked at John’s pale face among the more animated faces round him, Mr Crediton grew wellnigh spiteful. “That fellow! without an attraction!”--he would say to himself. John was not handsome; he had little of the ready wit and ready talk of society; he did not distinguish himself socially above other men; he was nobody to speak of--a country clergyman’s son without a penny. And yet he was to have