In fact, he and Bunce became great friends.

Bunce had entirely accepted the story he told about himself to the effect that he had once been "in an office in the city," and looked upon him as a superannuated bank clerk, too old to be kept on in his former line of business.

Questions that were put to him respecting his "late friend, James Deane," he answered with apparent good faith by saying that it was a long time since he had seen him, and that it was only as a "last forlorn hope" that he had set out to try and find him, "as he had always been helpful to those in need." Mary herself wished that this little fiction of her "father's friend" should be taken as fact by all the village, and a curious part of her character was that she never sought to ask Helmsley privately, for her own enlightenment, anything of his history.

She seemed content to accept him as an old and infirm man, who must be taken care of simply because he was old and infirm, without further question or argument.
Bunce was always very stedfast in his praise of her.
"She ought--yes--she ought possibly to have married,--" he said, in his slow, reflective way--"She would have made a good wife, and a still better mother.

But an all-wise Providence has a remarkable habit--yes, I think we may call it quite a remarkable habit!--of persuading men generally to choose thriftless and flighty women for their wives, and to leave the capable ones single.