“Don’t be so unkind. Surely we can show we’re sorry?”
“Well, you do the talking, then. I’ll stick here in the shade till I see what he looks like.”
“He’s walking very slowly. I’m sure he’s sad. Oh, poor Jim!”
CHAPTER VIII.
JIM EAST.
Jim East, in his dark-hued mourning garments, had from afar appeared sad indeed in the eyes of Frances. As he came nearer, she saw signs not of sadness alone, but of sensations more strange to the girlish onlooker. The sorrow he had just experienced could hardly account for the wistful expression in the lad’s face, or for a certain hopefulness in his bearing. Jim was coming forward to meet, with what courage he could command, the crucial moment of his young life. He was trying to assure himself that he had a right to expect that the ordeal would pass and leave him happy.
“He is very lonely,” reflected Frances pityingly; “he has begun to feel that he is lonely. I wish I could comfort him, but I don’t know how.”
Setting aside all possibility of administering comfort, it must surely be a simple thing to condole and sympathize with Jim. Frances felt that she could do both, for she had sincerely liked the old grandfather, and was glad now to recall the sacrificed holiday hours for which he had thanked her with moist eyes and grateful lips. She took a step forward lest Jim should pass her with his usual quiet salute, but she saw that this had not been his intention. He turned a little, even before she moved, and directed his course to her without hesitation.
“She will be kind,” thought the lad as his gaze rested on Frances, and she greeted him with a smile. “Grandfather was right, he said she would be kind. If only she knew how I want her to be kind!”
Jim’s yearning was no more translatable through his face than was his simple trust in a girl’s faith. Frances had left him the treasured belief that in her sight his work, however humble, was honourable; himself, however lowly, above reproach. She had not forced on him, as had Austin, more than once, the recognition of differences of class, habit, and attainment. These, she knew, were obvious enough to modest Jim. Instead, she had shown him a gracious friendliness which had roused the lad to wondering gratitude; while her intelligent interest in his monotonous labour had given it value apart from bread-winning necessity.
Jim, in his ill-fitting cloth suit of rustic cut, was in Frances’s eyes a much more pretentious and less picturesque figure than Jim the blacksmith working at his forge. A little half-conscious regret that Jim himself was likely to hold a contrary opinion was promptly stifled by the remembrance that in his case, at least, the wearing of mourning garb was no meaningless form.