She shook her head. “None.”
“Well, look here,” he said. “I’ll pay your fare back to France, if you’ll go.”
She stared at him incredulously. “Why you say that?” she asked.
“Because I hate to see a girl like you behaving like a filthy beast,” he answered sternly. “Oh, why were you such a fool as to start this life?”
“It begin,” she sighed, “it begin so sweet. I was very young; and the man he love me so much. He was the real amant-passioné—what you do not know in England. He used to kiss me until my head went round and round; and I was like a mad one when he came into the room. Never in my life again or before was I so drunken by a man....”
Daniel watched her as she told the story of her youthful love, and he saw her eyes grow drowsy and full of memories.
“You must have been very happy,” he said at length.
“Yes, I was happy,” she answered, “but I paid for the happiness with tears and weeping and bitterness.”
“Why?—did he desert you?”
Her voice, which had grown so tender and so near to a whisper, became light and clear in tone once more. “No,” she said, with an almost flippant gesture of the hand, “he died. He had the—how do you say?—the gall-stones.”