The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices — John Shaqi
The Lazy Tour of Two Idle ApprenticesDickens, Charles
General
The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices
Dickens, Charles
Apprentices -- Fiction; Cumbria (England) -- Description and travel -- Fiction; Walking -- England -- Cumbria -- Fiction
The interview to which I refer, occurred shortly before her death. I
called one evening, as usual, and found her alone, with a look in her
eyes which told me that she had been crying. She only informed me at
first, that she had been depressed in spirits; but, by little and little,
she became more communicative, and confessed to me that she had been
looking over some old letters, which had been addressed to her, before
she had seen Arthur, by a man to whom she had been engaged to be married.
I asked her how the engagement came to be broken off. She replied that
it had not been broken off, but that it had died out in a very mysterious
way. The person to whom she was engaged—her first love, she called
him—was very poor, and there was no immediate prospect of their being
married. He followed my profession, and went abroad to study. They had
corresponded regularly, until the time when, as she believed, he had
returned to England. From that period she heard no more of him. He was
of a fretful, sensitive temperament; and she feared that she might have
inadvertently done or said something that offended him. However that
might be, he had never written to her again; and, after waiting a year,
she had married Arthur. I asked when the first estrangement had begun,
and found that the time at which she ceased to hear anything of her first
lover exactly corresponded with the time at which I had been called in to
my mysterious patient at The Two Robins Inn.
A fortnight after that conversation, she died. In course of time, Arthur
married again. Of late years, he has lived principally in London, and I
have seen little or nothing of him.
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