“An employer?—monsieur—an employer?”
“Certainly. Did you imagine I intended to keep you on here indefinitely?”
She made no reply.
“Have you breakfasted?” he said.
She answered “Yes” gratefully, in a low voice.
He twisted about then, and regarded her. The wise Theophilus had, he saw, acquitted himself sensibly of his order. The girl was clothed freshly and simply. Her own instinctive niceness of touch, her kitten-like cleanliness, had ministered daintily to the result.
The young man’s brain swam for a moment. He could have thought he was back again in the lodge at Méricourt, the unsullied, fragrant presentment of a little jelly-loving Madonna charming the luminous shade of the dairy in which she sat; the sun, blazing upon the garden phloxes without, touching this his natural child’s head softly with a single beam.
In the same moment he dashed his hand, so to speak, upon the struggling fancy. He would not have it rise further to confront him. It was undeserved of its subject at the least. The promise it had once suggested had never been vindicated, and he would insist upon that now as an actual aggravation of the girl’s demerits, seeing that, at this late hour of her practical punishment for a wickedness confessed, she could still so far look her old self as to inspire—and demoralise—a certain emotion of regard. Even the very hollows in her cheeks seemed filled since yesterday; and she wore her new shoes and stockings without a hint of their discomforting her wounded feet.
Was it then that a constitution could be so flawless as to be debarred, by ignorance of suffering, from suffering’s prerogative of moral exaltation—that the nerves of emotion inherited from the nerves of physical feeling? If it were so, it were idle in this case to be considerate of the former.
He put his hand into his coat pocket and, producing a small parcel, held it out to her.