“My poor child! my poor, poor child!” said Mrs. Bird, wiping her eyes, “please don’t talk like that. Who am I, that I should judge you? though it is true that I do like young women to be respectable; and so they would be if it wasn’t for the men, the villains! I’d just like to tear the eyes out of this wicked one, I would, who first of all leads you into trouble and then deserts you.”
“Don’t speak of him like that,” said Joan: “he didn’t lead me,—if anything, I led him; and he didn’t desert me, I ran away from him. I think that he would have married me if I had asked him, but I will have nothing to do with him.”
“Why, the girl must be mad!” said Mrs. Bird blankly. “Is he a gentleman?”
“Yes, if ever there was one; and I’m not mad, only can’t you understand that one may love a man so much that one would die rather than bring him into difficulties! There, it’s a long story, but he would be ruined were he to marry me. There’s another girl whom he ought to marry a lady.”
“He would be ruined, indeed! And what will you be, pray?”
“I don’t know, and I don’t care: dead, I hope, before long. Oh!” and she wrung her hands piteously, “I saw him in the shop this afternoon; he was quite close to me. Yes, he looked at a cloak that I was showing, and never knew me who wore it. That’s what has broken me down: so long as I did not see him I could bear it, but now my heart feels as though it would burst. To think that he should have been so close to me and not have known me, oh! it is cruel, cruel!”
“Dear, dear!” said Mrs. Bird, “really I feel quite upset: I am not accustomed to this sort of thing. If you will excuse me I will go and look for my salts. And now you get into bed like a good girl, and stop there.”
“Am I not to go away, then?” asked Joan.
“Certainly not—at any rate for the present. You are much too ill to go anywhere. And now there is just one thing that I should like to know, and you may as well tell it me as you have told me so much. What is this gentleman’s name?”
“I’ll not tell you,” answered Joan sullenly: “if I told you, you would be troubling him; besides, I have no right to give away his secrets, whatever I do with my own.”