He stopped, with a sense of alarmed clumsiness. Because she was weary, the girl sat down on the cold stone bench before answering.
"You are quite wrong," she said quietly. "I cannot do clever things at all. I do not mean that I am stupid, exactly, but that I cannot do anything so especially well as to make people pay me for it. Neither can my father. I think he is the best man in the world, and my mother the dearest woman, but they cannot make money. He is a professor of romance and history, at a small college in Louisiana. There are a good many of us—I have four younger sisters—so I came North to support myself."
"But——"
"Not as a nurse, of course. I came with an old lady whose son we knew at the college. She asked me to be her private secretary. But after a few months she died. I could not go back to be a burden. After I had tried to find other things to do, and failed, I came to take care of Holly. Why are we talking about me? There was something important, you said?"
"I—yes," Adriance said. He could read so much more than she told. Afterward he was ashamed to remember that he neither felt nor expressed any pity for her disappointed hopes. His whole attention was fixed on her steady courage; the fighting spirit that he had divined in her and toward which his indecision reached weak hands groping in the dark for support.
The girl shrank behind the stone column nearest her as a blast of freezing wind rushed past.
"Well?" she spurred his hesitation.
She was successful. He moved nearer her to be heard; the fever of the last twenty-four hours thickened and hurried his speech.
"I'm not going to tell you about Mrs. Masterson," he told her. "In the first place, you would not listen, and in the second place, I have nothing to say. But you must know that last evening she broke her engagement with me. I mean, before I saw you in the nursery. I was free, then."
"She dismissed you?"