I had apparently most reason for
dejection, because I was leaving the saviour of my life; yet I,
considering the shock my health had received, was cheerful and full of
hope. She, on the contrary, who was parting with one who had had little
means of serving her, except by kindness and brotherly treatment, was
overcome by sorrow; so that, when I kissed her at our final farewell, she
put her arms about my neck and wept without speaking a word. I hoped to
return in a week at farthest, and I agreed with her that on the fifth
night from that, and every night afterwards, she would wait for me at six
o'clock near the bottom of Great Titchfield Street, which had been our
customary haven, as it were, of rendezvous, to prevent our missing each
other in the great Mediterranean of Oxford Street. This and other
measures of precaution I took; one only I forgot. She had either never
told me, or (as a matter of no great interest) I had forgotten her
surname. It is a general practice, indeed, with girls of humble rank in
her unhappy condition, not (as novel-reading women of higher pretensions)
to style themselves _Miss Douglas_, _Miss Montague_, &c., but simply by
their Christian names--_Mary_, _Jane_, _Frances_, &c. Her surname, as
the surest means of tracing her hereafter, I ought now to have inquired;
but the truth is, having no reason to think that our meeting could, in
consequence of a short interruption, be more difficult or uncertain than
it had been for so many weeks, I had scarcely for a moment adverted to it
as necessary, or placed it amongst my memoranda against this parting
interview; and my final anxieties being spent in comforting her with
hopes, and in pressing upon her the necessity of getting some medicines
for a violent cough and hoarseness with which she was troubled, I wholly
forgot it until it was too late to recall her.
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