Page:Gissing - The Nether World, vol. II, 1889.djvu/140

 “Have no fear about my understanding you. We’ve talked a great deal together, and I know veiy well what your strongest motives are. Trust me to sympathise with you.”

“I do! If I hadn’t that trust, Sidney, I couldn’t have felt the joy I did when you spoke to me of my Jane. You’ll help me to carry out my plan; you and Jane will; you and Jane! I’ve got to be such an old man all at once, as it seems, and I dursn’t have waited much longer without telling you what I had in my mind. See now, I’ll go back to when I was a boy, as far back as I can remember. You know I was born in Clerkenwell, and I’ve told you a little now and then of the hard times I went through. My poor father and mother came out of the country, thinking to better themselves; instead of that, they found nothing but cold and hunger, and toil and moil. They were both dead by when I was between thirteen and fourteen. They died in the same winter,—a cruel winter. I used to go about begging bits of firewood from the neighbours.