He laid a hand on either of her shoulders, and spoke to her gently enough.
“Mollie,” he said, “let us sit down together and condole with each other. You are not in a good humor to-night, something has rasped you again; and as for me, I am about as miserable, my dear, as it is possible for a man with a few thousand a year to be.”
She tried to answer him steadily, and, finding she could not, rushed into novel subterfuge. Subterfuge was a novelty to Mollie.
“Yes,” she said, lifting the most beauteous of tear-wet eyes to his quite eagerly. “Yes, I am crossed, and—and something has vexed me. I am getting bad-tempered, I think. Suppose we do sit down.”
And then when they did sit down—she on the hearth-rug at his feet, he in Dolly's chair again—she broke out upon him in a voice like a sharp little sob.
“I know what you are miserable about,” she said. “You are miserable about Dolly.”
They had never spoken about the matter openly before, though he had always felt that if he could speak openly to any one, he could to this charming charge of his. Such is the keenness of masculine penetration. And now he felt almost relieved already. The natural craving for sympathy of some kind or other was to satisfy itself through the medium of pretty, much-tried Mollie.
“Yes,” he answered, half desperately, half reluctantly. “Dolly is the moon I am crying for,—or rather, as I might put it more poetically, 'the bright particular star.' What a good little thing you are to guess at it so soon!”
“It did n't need much guessing at,” she said, curving her innocent mouth in a piteous effort to smile.
He, leaning against the round, padded back of his chair, sighed, and as he sighed almost forgot the poor child altogether, even while she spoke to him. Having all things else, he must still cry for this one other gift, and really he felt very dolorous.