“It wasn’t her fault, you must understand,” Allerton explained further, as Steptoe brushed his hat. “She didn’t want to. I persuaded her. I wanted to do something that would wring Miss Walbrook’s heart—and I’ve done it! Wrung my own, too! What’s to become of me, Steptoe? Is the best thing I can do to shoot myself? Think it over. I’m ready to. I’m not sure that it wouldn’t be a relief to get out of this 50 rotten life. I’m all on edge. I could jump out of that window as easily as not. But it wasn’t the girl’s fault. She’s a poor little waif of a thing. You must look after her and keep me from seeing her again, but she’s not bad—only—only—Oh, my God! my God!”
He covered his face with his hands and rocked himself about, so that Steptoe was obliged to go on brushing till his master calmed himself.
“Do you think, sir,” he said then, “that this is the ’at to go with this ’ere suit? I think as the brown one would be a lot chicker—tone in with the sort of fawn stripe in the blue like, and ketch the note in your tie.” He added, while diving into the closet in search of the brown hat and bringing it out, “There’s one thing I could say right now, Mr. Rash, and I think it might ’elp.”
“What is it?”
“Do you remember the time when you ’urt your leg ’unting down in Long Island?”
“Yes; what about it?”
“You was all for not payin’ it no attention and for ’oppin’ about as if you ’adn’t ’urt it at all. A terr’ble fuss you myde when the doctor said as you was to keep still. Anybody ’ud ’ave thought ’e’d bordered a hamputation. And yet it was keepin’ still what got you out o’ the trouble, now wasn’t it?”
“Well?”
“Well, now you’re in a worse trouble still it might do the syme again. I’m a great believer in keepin’ still, I am.”
Allerton was off again. “How in thunder am I to keep still when––?”