'
'A very strange fellow! Do you mean that you never knew one, or that you
don't choose to tell it? Which?'
'I'd tell it if I could,' said Hugh, quickly. 'I can't. I have been
always called Hugh; nothing more. I never knew, nor saw, nor thought
about a father; and I was a boy of six--that's not very old--when they
hung my mother up at Tyburn for a couple of thousand men to stare at.
They might have let her live. She was poor enough.'
'How very sad!' exclaimed his patron, with a condescending smile. 'I
have no doubt she was an exceedingly fine woman.'
'You see that dog of mine?' said Hugh, abruptly.
'Faithful, I dare say?' rejoined his patron, looking at him through his
glass; 'and immensely clever? Virtuous and gifted animals, whether man
or beast, always are so very hideous.'
'Such a dog as that, and one of the same breed, was the only living
thing except me that howled that day,' said Hugh. 'Out of the two
thousand odd--there was a larger crowd for its being a woman--the dog
and I alone had any pity. If he'd have been a man, he'd have been
glad to be quit of her, for she had been forced to keep him lean and
half-starved; but being a dog, and not having a man's sense, he was
sorry.
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