Madonna had felt Patty's hand pulling at her arm more than once during
the last minute or two. She was now quite as anxious as her companion
to quit the house. They went out quickly, not venturing to look at Mat
again; and the landlady followed them. She and Patty had a long talk
together at the street door--evidently, judging by the expression of
their faces, about the conduct of the rough lodger up-stairs. But
Madonna felt no desire to be informed particularly of what they were
saying to each other. Much as Matthew's strange behavior had surprised
and startled her, he was not the uppermost subject in her mind just
then. It was the discovery of her secret, the failure of her little
plan for helping Zack with her own money, that she was now thinking of
with equal confusion and dismay. She had not been in the front room at
Kirk Street much more than five minutes altogether--yet what a
succession of untoward events had passed in that short space of time!
For a long while after the women had left him, Mat stood motionless in
the furthest corner of the room from the folding-doors, looking
vacantly towards Zack's bedchamber. His first surprise on finding a
stranger talking in the passage, when he let himself in from the
street; his first vexation on hearing of Zack's accident from the
landlady; his momentary impulse to discover himself to Mary's child,
when he saw Madonna standing in his room, and again when he knew that
she had come there with her little offering, for the one kind purpose
of helping the sick lad in his distress--all these sensations were now
gone from his memory as well as from his heart; absorbed in the one
predominant emotion with which the discovery of the resemblance between
Zack's hair and the hair from Jane Holdworth's letter now filled him.
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