Just at this time there was only one thing on which Frithiof found any satisfaction, and that was in the little store of money which by slow degrees he was able to place in the savings bank. In what way it could ever grow into a sum large enough to pay his father’s creditors he did not trouble himself to think, but week by week it did increase, and with this one aim in life he struggled on, working early and late, and living on an amount of food which could have horrified an Englishman. Luckily he had discovered a place in Oxford Street where he could get a good dinner every day for sixpence, but this was practically his only meal, and after some months the scanty fare began to tell upon him, so that even the Miss Turnours noticed that something was wrong.
“That young man looks to me underfed,” said Miss Caroline one day. “I met him on the stairs just now, and he seems to me to have grown paler and thinner. What does he have for breakfast, Charlotte? Does he eat as well as the other lodgers?”
“Dear me, no,” said Miss Charlotte. “It’s my belief that he eats nothing at all but ship’s biscuits. There’s a tin of them up in his room, and a tin of cocoa, which he makes for himself. All I ever take him is a jug of boiling water night and morning!”
“Poor fellow!” said Miss Caroline, sighing a little as she plaited some lace which must have been washed a hundred times into her dress.
A delicate carefulness in these little details of dress distinguished the three ladies—they had inherited it with the spelling of their name and other tokens of good breeding.
“I feel sorry for him,” she added. “He always bows very politely when I meet him, and he is remarkably good-looking, though with a disagreeable expression.”
“When one is hungry one seldom looks agreeable,” said Miss Charlotte. “I wish I had noticed him before,” and she remembered, with a little pang of remorse, that she had more than once preached to him about his soul, while all the time she had been too dreamy and unobservant to see what was really wrong with him.
“Suppose,” she said timidly, “suppose I were to take him a little of the stewed American beef we shall have for supper.”
“Send it up by the girl,” said Miss Turnour, “she is still in the kitchen. Don’t take it yourself—it would be awkward for both of you.”