But it made no impression upon him who had no conception of the cold that knows not how it is ever to get warm again. He rushed on:
"Lorna, my God!" He caught hold of her and strained her to his breast. "You are lovely and sweet! It's frightful—you in this life."
Her expression made the sobs choke up into his throat. She said quietly: "Not worse than dirt and vermin and freezing cold and long, long, dull—oh, so dull hours of working among human beings that don't ever wash—because they can't." She pushed him gently away. "You don't understand. You haven't been through it. Comfortable people talk like fools about those things. . . . Do you remember my hands that first evening?"
He reddened and his eyes shifted. "I'm absurdly sensitive about a woman's hands," he muttered.
She laughed at him. "Oh, I saw—how you couldn't bear to look at them—how they made you shiver. Well, the hands were nothing—nothing!—beside what you didn't see."
"Lorna, do you love someone else?"
His eyes demanded an honest answer, and it seemed to her his feeling for her deserved it. But she could not put the answer into words. She lowered her gaze.
"Then why——" he began impetuously. But there he halted, for he knew she would not lift the veil over herself, over her past.
"I'm very, very fond of you," she said with depressing friendliness. Then with a sweet laugh, "You ought to be glad I'm not able to take you at your word. And you will be glad soon." She sighed. "What a good time we've had!"
"If I only had a decent allowance, like Fatty!" he groaned.