"Yes—I like it." The girl looked away, and went on nervously, hesitatingly. "It is very well done," she said, "It is very clever."
"Oh, if that is all you can find to say about it!"
"But isn't it a great deal?—Mr. Kenyon, I don't know what to say about it. You see I can't be sure whether it is all—true."
"True? The story? But, of course——"
"Of course the story is not true. I am not such a goose as that. But is the meaning of it true? the moral, so to speak? Is there so much wickedness in the world as my father says? So much vice and wealth and selfishness on the one side: so much misery and poverty and crime on the other? You are a doctor, and you must have seen a great deal of London life: you ought to know. Is it an exaggeration, or is it true?"
There was such intensity and such pathos in her tones that Kenyon was silent for a minute or two, startled by the vivid reality which she had attached to her father's views and ideas. He could not have answered her lightly, even if it had been in his nature to do so.
"Before God," he said, solemnly, "it is all true—every word of it."
"Then what can we do," said Lesley, gently, "but go down into the midst of it and help?"
Mr. Maurice Kenyon, being a man of ardent temperament, always vows that he lost his heart to Lesley there and then. It is possible that if she had not been a very pretty girl, the most noble of sentiments might have fallen unheeded from her lips; but as she was "so young, so sweet, so delicately fair," Kenyon could not hear his own opinions reciprocated without an answering thrill. How delightful would it be to walk through life with a woman of this kind by one's side! a woman, whose face was a picture, whose every movement a poem, whose soul was as finely touched to fine issues as that of an angel or a saint! All these reflections rushed through his mind in an instant, and it was almost a wonder that he did not blurt some of them out at once. But Lesley went on speaking in a quiet, pensive way.
"I wonder whether I can do anything—while I am here. I shall not have so very long a time, but I might try."