"Why not? You would not let these men up there take your money if you saw them."
There was a grotesque sweetness in Meg's appearance as she stood there in her skimpy dress, her short dusky hair falling in masses about her neck and over her forehead. There came to the young journalist a remembrance of those wingless angels that the pre-Raphaelite masters painted, gracious, grave, workaday beings, with unearthly wise faces. But it was not as a picture that he contemplated Meg; the thought of the goodness, the purity, the holiness of the child, who knew so much and understood so little of life, overcame him. Her innocence almost frightened him. He felt the sacredness of a vow taken to her; it would be more binding than one taken before a court of justice.
"What is it that you want me to promise, Meg?" he asked.
"Not to let them take your money from you, not to let them give you drink," she replied with her accustomed unhesitancy, but her voice faltering with harbored longing.
"Not drink at all?" he asked.
"I wish not at all; I wish not at all," she replied with unconscious repetition.
"Look here, Meg; I'll promise you this—I'll not waste my money, and I'll not tipple like Mrs. Browne downstairs. Will that satisfy you?"
"You promise!" said Meg vehemently, with another upward flash of the well-formed little brown hand, and holding him with her eyes.
"I promise," said Mr. Standish gravely, disguising an inclination to laugh.
The young man was busy in the intervals of journalistic work composing a political squib. He had not so much time to devote to Meg as in the less-employed days, but he allowed her to sit near him when he wrote, reading the story-books and ballads he gave her. In his leisure, as he smoked his pipe, he watched with half-closed eyes the quaint little figure, and drew the child out to talk. He explained the difficult passages in the books she read, and gave her lessons in recitation. Better than anything to Meg, he sometimes imparted to her the last bon mot he had put into the mouth of "Sultan Will" to his suffering subjects—a confidence that invariably produced abnormal gravity in Meg.