“No, Mrs Barclay, we seem to have been a little better off lately.”
“But you are in trouble, my darling? Now don’t say you aren’t, but speak out plain to me. Oh, I wish I could make you believe that I am a very, very true friend, and that I want to help you. There, I know: you’ve been falling out with Cora Dean.”
Mrs Barclay prided herself on this as being a master stroke of policy to draw Claire out and make her ready to confide in her; but Claire shook her head and smiled sadly.
“No,” she said dreamily, “I am not in trouble about that. I thought I would call and see you to-day. There, I must go now.”
“Is that all?” said Mrs Barclay in a disappointed tone. “Why, I was in hopes that you were over head and ears in trouble, and had come to me for help.”
“Mrs Barclay!” exclaimed Claire.
“No, no, no, my dear. What a stupid old woman I am! I didn’t mean that, but if you were in trouble, I hoped that, seeing how much you are alone, you had come to me for help and advice.”
Claire’s face worked and her lips quivered. She vainly tried to speak, and finally, utterly broken-down with the agony of her encounters on the previous day with Louis and her sister, with the following sleepless night and the despair of the present day, during which she had been vainly striving to see some way out of the difficulty, she threw herself upon the breast offered to receive her troubles and sobbed aloud.
“I knew—I knew,” whispered Mrs Barclay, soothing and caressing the poor girl by turns. “I knew as well as if some one had told me that you were in trouble and wanted help. There, there, cry away, my darling. Have a good long patient one, and don’t hurry yourself. You’ll be a world better afterwards; and if you like then to tell me about it, why, you see, you can, and if you don’t like to, why, there’s no harm done.”
Even if the amiable plump old soul had said nothing more than the first sympathising words, Claire’s emotion, so long pent up, would now have had its vent, the tears seeming to relieve her overburdened brain as she clung to her hostess, listening, and yet only half hearing her whispered words.