"
"At a word, my kind hostess, I cannot," said Olifaunt; "I am anxious
about this knave of mine, who has been so long absent in this
dangerous town of yours."
It may be noticed in passing that Dame Nelly's ordinary mode of
consolation was to disprove the existence of any cause for distress;
and she is said to have carried this so far as to comfort a neighbour,
who had lost her husband, with the assurance that the dear defunct
would be better to-morrow, which perhaps might not have proved an
appropriate, even if it had been a possible, mode of relief.
On this occasion she denied stoutly that Richie had been absent
altogether twenty hours; and as for people being killed in the streets
of London, to be sure two men had been found in Tower-ditch last week,
but that was far to the east, and the other poor man that had his
throat cut in the fields, had met his mishap near by Islington; and he
that was stabbed by the young Templar in a drunken frolic, by Saint
Clement's in the Strand, was an Irishman. All which evidence she
produced to show that none of these casualties had occurred in a case
exactly parallel with that of Richie, a Scotsman, and on his return
from Westminster.
"My better comfort is, my good dame," answered Olifaunt, "that the lad
is no brawler or quarreller, unless strongly urged, and that he has
nothing valuable about him to any one but me.
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