"I will be your friend, Rosalind. Trust me. I can't understand at all. You are altogether a mystery to me; I can't understand, for one thing, how a girl like you comes to be living with Sophie Cornell——"
"I came here quite by accident," she interrupted him. "I have always meant to tell you, though I know that for some reason Sophie doesn't want you to know. I walked into the garden one day, and saw Sophie using a typewriter, and I came in and asked her to take me for an assistant."
"What! But weren't you a governess to some people in Kimberley, and an old friend of Sophie's in Johannesburg?"
"No, I've never been a governess, and I never saw Sophie until I walked in here some three months ago. The girl you take me for never came at all, and Sophie was glad to have me take her place, I suppose. But, indeed, it was good of her to take me in, and I am not ungrateful. I will pay her back some day, for she is of the kind money will repay for anything." She added this rather bitterly, for, indeed, Sophie never ceased to make her feel her obligations, in spite of daily slavery on the typewriter.
"Well, of all the—!" Bramham began. Later, he allowed himself to remark:
"She certainly is a bird of Paradise!" and that was his eulogy on Sophie Cornell.
"But how comes it that a girl like you is—excuse me—kicking about the world, at a loose end?—How can any fellow that has your love let you suffer!—The whole thing is incomprehensible! But whatever you say stands. You needn't say anything at all if you don't want to——"
"I can't tell you anything," she said brokenly. "If I could tell anyone, it would be you—but I can't. Only—I want a friend, Charlie—I want help."
"I'll do anything in the world for you—all you've got to say is 'Knife.'"
"I want to get away from Africa to England, and I haven't a penny in the world, nor any possessions except the things I am wearing now."