‘Well,’ said Paul, ‘you shan’t. I’m not going to let you.’ She laughed oddly with a mere ejaculation, and stared along the road. ‘Do you ever think what hell is like?’ he asked.
‘Would I drink if I didn’t?’ she answered without looking at him.
‘You can’t put it away by drinking.’
‘I know that,’ she answered, with a sudden sullen fierceness. Then, ‘Ye mean well, I dare say, but ye’re wastin’ time. Go your ways.’
‘It’s no use asking,’ said Paul; ‘I can’t do it.’ She looked up at him again, and he hurried on, with a dry husk in his throat: ‘I can’t rest for thinking of it I can’t eat I can’t sleep. I can’t think of anything else.’
A slight spasm contorted her lips for a mere instant, but she looked down the road again, and answered drearily:
‘That’s a pity.’
There was a tone of tired scorn in her words, but this, as it were, was only on the surface. There was something else below, and the sense of it urged him on.
‘You have a good face,’ he said. ‘You were not meant——’
He checked himself.