“Strictly speaking,” said he, “I come from Charley, because I left him only a little while ago; but I am not commissioned by Charley. I come of my own spontaneous act.”

With her elbows on her bench, and her chin upon her hands, Miss Jenny Wren sat looking at him with a watchful sidelong look. Lizzie, in her different way, sat looking at him too.

“The fact is,” began Bradley, with a mouth so dry that he had some difficulty in articulating his words: the consciousness of which rendered his manner still more ungainly and undecided; “the truth is, that Charley, having no secrets from me (to the best of my belief), has confided the whole of this matter to me.”

He came to a stop, and Lizzie asked: “what matter, sir?”

“I thought,” returned the schoolmaster, stealing another look at her, and seeming to try in vain to sustain it; for the look dropped as it lighted on her eyes, “that it might be so superfluous as to be almost impertinent, to enter upon a definition of it. My allusion was to this matter of your having put aside your brother’s plans for you, and given the preference to those of Mr — I believe the name is Mr Eugene Wrayburn.”

He made this point of not being certain of the name, with another uneasy look at her, which dropped like the last.

Nothing being said on the other side, he had to begin again, and began with new embarrassment.

“Your brother’s plans were communicated to me when he first had them in his thoughts. In point of fact he spoke to me about them when I was last here — when we were walking back together, and when I — when the impression was fresh upon me of having seen his sister.”

There might have been no meaning in it, but the little dressmaker here removed one of her supporting hands from her chin, and musingly turned the Honorable Mrs T. with her face to the company. That done, she fell into her former attitude.

“I approved of his idea,” said Bradley, with his uneasy look wandering to the doll, and unconsciously resting there longer than it had rested on Lizzie, “both because your brother ought naturally to be the originator of any such scheme, and because I hoped to be able to promote it. I should have had inexpressible pleasure, I should have taken inexpressible interest, in promoting it. Therefore I must acknowledge that when your brother was disappointed, I too was disappointed. I wish to avoid reservation or concealment, and I fully acknowledge that.”

He appeared to have encouraged himself by having got so far. At all events he went on with much greater firmness and force of emphasis: though with a curious disposition to set his teeth, and with a curious tight-screwing movement of his right hand in the clenching palm of his left, like the action of one who was being physically hurt, and was unwilling to cry out.

“I am a man of strong feelings, and I have strongly felt this disappointment. I do strongly feel it. I don’t show what I feel; some of us are obliged habitually to keep it down. To keep it down. But to return to your brother. He has taken the matter so much to heart that he has remonstrated (in my presence he remonstrated) with Mr Eugene Wrayburn, if that be the name. He did so, quite ineffectually. As any one not blinded to the real character of Mr — Mr Eugene Wrayburn — would readily suppose.”

He looked at Lizzie again, and held the look. And his face turned from burning red to white, and from white back to burning red, and so for the time to lasting deadly white.

“Finally, I resolved to come here alone, and appeal to you. I resolved to come here alone, and entreat you to retract the course you have chosen, and instead of confiding in a mere stranger — a person of most insolent behaviour to your brother and others — to prefer your brother and your brother’s friend.”