“I’m coming to that,” Mrs. Burfield answered, with a sigh that was more profound than usual. “You see, sir, it happened at this time, being the end of the season, and Coltonslough as empty as it could be; it happened that we were without a servant; so myself and Susan Turner took it in turns to wait upon the young gentleman. Not that I ever asked her to do anything that you can call menial; but she’d take him up his tea, and clear away his dinner things, and light his candles for him, and such like; and knowing her to be a respectable young woman, I didn’t keep that sharp watch over her that some folks might have done. If she stopped ten minutes or so in his room, talking to him, I usen’t to think anything about it--you can hear almost every sound in these houses, and it was quite pleasant to hear her soft voice and his laugh ringing out every now and then. He wasn’t the sort of gentleman you could suspect of any harm, he had such a happy kind of way with him, as if he was good friends with himself and all the world. He lent Susan books--books of poetry, with all sorts of pencil-writing upon the edges of them; and I used sometimes to fancy Susan cared more for the pencil-writing than she did for the poetry itself; she’d sit and pore over it so when the children were gone to bed and we were alone in this room. Sometimes the plucked young gentleman would come down here of an evening to fetch himself another candle, or to tell us that he’d let his fire out, or something of that kind; for he wasn’t a bit proud; and then, instead of going back directly, he’d sit down and make himself as much at home as if he had lived among us all his life; and Oh, dear me, sir, how he would talk!--all about books and poetry, and the foreign places he’d seen, and plays, and music, and writers, and actors, and singers. He seemed to know everything in the world. So, you see, one way and another, he saw a good deal of Susan; for I found out afterwards from the children that when he went out in the dusk to smoke his cigar he generally contrived to meet Susan, and then he’d walk with her and the children till it was time for them to go indoors. She was a good girl, and she wasn’t the girl to throw herself in his way. If they were much together, it was because he followed her. I might have known the meaning of his sitting in this room for hours together of a night; but he had such a natural way of doing everything that it threw one off one’s guard, somehow.” “The scoundrel!” muttered Francis Tredethlyn, between his clenched teeth. “But you haven’t told me his name. I want to know his name.”