“Well, I’m going. I shall come again to-morrow, if not this evening, to pay my bill and—”
Nell raised her face with an angry flush.
“You will not pay it,” she said, quickly. “Do you think, when you have lost so much money in the house, that we would allow you to?”
“But that was not your fault nor your uncle’s.”
Again the mysterious trouble, that suggested at least a guilty half-knowledge, appeared in the girl’s eyes. Clifford turned away his head that he might not see it.
“I think we ought to bear the responsibility,” she said earnestly.
“But I do not. Why should people who are absolutely good suffer for the faults of the absolutely bad?”
Nell sighed.
“Absolutely good! We are not that. At least I can answer for myself as to that.”
“Who could contest the goodness of a girl who can risk her own health, perhaps even her life, to minister to a sick woman?”