“Master,” said Purcell, pausing at the door before they entered. It was one of the Italian traditions which had lingered in the Signor’s habitual bearing, to stand still now and then as he was walking, by way of giving emphasis to a sentence. They paused now, looking at each other before they went in, and the colour came to the young fellow’s face. “Master,” he said, “it may look self-sufficient--but how can it end otherwise? There is no one else who will offer her what I can offer her; and it would be like saying she had no sense, which is very far from the case, to think she would stand out for ever. She is a lady, she is above me in birth; but, thanks to you, I know how to behave like a gentleman; and surely, sooner or later, this is how it must end.” “Amen, with all my heart,” said the Signor, turning in at the door, which old Pick held open behind, waiting, as one who knew his master’s way. It was Mr. Ashford who had intoned the service that afternoon, and his attention had been so caught by Polly’s entrance that he had made a kind of stumble in the beginning--a pause which was perceptible. After that, during the singing of the anthem and at other moments when his attention was free, he had looked down upon that gorgeous apparition from his high desk with a look of compassion on his face. The compassion, it is needless to say, was not for Polly, who wanted none of it. He watched her behind his book, or behind the hand which supported his head, with the most curious alarmed attention. And when he passed her with her husband going out, Mr. Ashford looked at her in a way which Polly thought to be flattering. “That’s one as takes an interest in us,” she said. “It’s Ashford, the Minor Canon. It must be you he takes an interest in,” whispered the Captain, and Polly laughed and tossed her head. Mr. Ashford went home with the same strange look on his face, softened, and touched, and pitiful. “Poor thing,” he said to himself, “poor girl!” and when he got in he sat for a long time in the centre window, in the dark, looking out, and trying to think out some way of help. What could he do for her? Poor thing! with all her better instincts and higher feelings, with her impulse of taking care of everybody and keeping her father and brother right, what would become of her now? Mr. Ashford asked himself, with many an anxious thought, what could be done? A man could do nothing--where it was a girl that was in the case a man was more helpless than a baby. He could do nothing to help her; he could not even show his sympathy without probably doing more harm than good to the sufferer. He sat in the window-seat, gazing out on the dusk and the dim horizon, as if they could help him in his musings. If he had only had a mother or sister--any woman to whom he could have appealed, he thought he must have done so on behalf of this girl. But he had neither sister nor mother. He was a man very much alone in the world.