‘Nelly dear, don’t speak of it,’ said the padrona, who was ignorant of all the complications; and she went and gave the little messenger of consolation a kiss, and suffered herself to shed a tear or two out of her full heart. ‘I thought it would have killed me at first,’ she said, going back to her work with trembling hands. And the hand that shook so made a dreadful business of Cinderella’s white dress, and then the mother put away her tools, and sat down and cried. Nelly had been poor Severn’s pupil in the old, old days, and the sight of her brought nothing but softening thoughts to the padrona’s mind; and the fountain was opened that she kept so bravely shut. As for Nelly herself, every moment in that room was good for her. She cried too, and washed all her bitterness away in those tears, and turned Frank Renton and all his misdoings courageously out of her imagination. I doubt whether he had ever got so far as her heart. ‘I only want you to tell me one thing,’ she said, somewhat fiercely, to Alice, who came in, all unconscious, after the tears were dried, glad and wondering. ‘Was it going on when you were at Richmont?’ ‘It?--what?’ said simple Alice, and then the child’s ready blush covered her face. ‘Oh, no, no! It never came on at all; it came into our minds in a moment, when we knew he was going away.’ And Nelly Rich was so magnanimous as to kiss Alice too. ‘Tell him I did it,--and that I bear no malice,’ she said, with a laugh; and then went away with Miss Hadley, who saw her safely to the railway station, and made the story still more plain to her. The governess thought it strange of Mrs. Rich to permit her daughter to run about alone in this way, but reflected that it might be one of the strange customs of ‘those sort of people,’ and did her duty by the young lady, putting her under the care of the guard, and keeping an eye on the carriage till the train started. The journey might be slightly indecorous, but it did more good than any tonic in the world.