"Sister!" she cried in a whisper, sinking on a chair, and losing at once all her fierce aspect and enhanced colour.
"To-night I find a sister who is in despair because of the loss of her child. I restore her child to her empty arms, and I say, 'My roof is your roof, and my bread is your bread.'" He lit a candle, and handed it to her. "Go to your room where the boy is, and take him in your arms, for it comforts a mother to have her child in her arms. I shall stay here. It is dawn already, and I have work to do. Good-night."
When Philip Ray left Crawford's House that night he felt anything at all but the elation supposed to be proper in the accepted suitor of a beautiful girl. He had, indeed, a great many troubles in his mind, and as he walked home to his lonely lodgings in Camberwell he was nearly a miserable man. It would not be true to say he was out and out miserable, but he was perilously close to it.
In the first place, he had to leave Hetty behind him, a thing almost beyond endurance. Then, when removed from the intoxicating influence of her presence and undistracted by the magic of her beauty, he began to turn his eyes inward upon himself, and investigate his own unworthiness with brutal candour--nay, with gross injustice.
What on earth was he that a faultless, an exquisite creature like Hetty should give herself to him? That was a question he asked himself over and over again, without being able to find any reason whatever for her sacrifice. More than once he felt inclined to go back, make a clean breast of it by telling her that as a friend he would recommend her to have nothing whatever to do with himself. The words of love and devotion she had spoken to him on the island were a source of intense pain to him. A nice kind of fellow _he_ was indeed for her to say _she_ would follow round all the world! He was obtaining love under false pretences, that's what he was doing. And such love! and from such a perfect creature! It was simply a monstrous fraud! There was something underhand and dishonourable about it; for if she had only known him for what he was, she would flee out of the very parish away from him. He must have been mad to ask her to marry him.
It had all come on him suddenly. When he suggested that she should go to the island with him on the excuse of seeing how the boy got on, he had no intention of proposing to her; and, nevertheless, no sooner had he set foot on the Ait than he must retain her hand and ask her to give it to him for ever! Could he have meant the whole thing as a joke, or was the Master of all Evil at the bottom of it?