“All my fault—my fault!” the girl kept murmuring, as she hung over Clifford, watching his face, which had grown pale, with straining eyes, and listening anxiously to the breathing, which told her that he was alive.
Then Meg became abruptly conscious that there was something in this simple grief, this maidenly affection, too sacred for the gaze of the rough, though sympathetic, group. And she bundled them all, with large, wide-sweeping gestures as of a gigantic hen, back into the bar. And Nell and her lover and her uncle were left together.
George Claris, though he, too, was somewhat touched, was uneasy and suspicious.
“What was he doing down here?” he began, inquisitorially, when they were left alone. “And what was he up to that made Jem Stickels knife him? No good, I’ll be bound,” grumbled he.
Nell, without raising her eyes from her lover’s face, answered, mechanically, with white lips:
“He loves me, uncle. He has asked me, weeks ago, to be his wife, but I hadn’t even promised; no, not a word; but when he came to-day—”
“Ah, what made him come to-day?”
Nell hesitated, and then confessed, in a low voice:
“I sent for him.”
George Claris mumbled his dissatisfaction.