He fidgetted in his chair and rose.
"Nobody could help bein' kind ... to you, ma'am," he stammered. "If anybody was anything but kind to you they deserve...."
He realized of a sudden that the man for whose sake she was undergoing this ordeal had been cruel to her, and checked himself. Because bitterness surged up within him and he felt that to follow his first impulses would place him between Ann Lytton and her husband, aligned against the man in the rôle of protector.
She divined the reason for his silence and said very gently,
"Remember the cripples!"
He turned toward her so fiercely that she started back, having risen.
"I'm tryin' to!" he cried, with a surprising sharpness. "Tryin' to, ma'am, every minute; tryin' to remember th' cripples."
He looked about in flushed confusion. Ann stared at him.
His intensity frightened her. The men of her experience would not have presumed to show such direct interest in her affairs on brief acquaintance. A deal of conventional sparring and shamming would have been required for any of them to evince a degree of passion in the discussion of her predicament; but this man, on their second meeting, was obviously forced to hold himself firmly, restraining a natural prompting to step in and adjust matters to accord with his own sense of right. The girl felt instinctively that his motives were most high, but his manner was rough and new; she was accustomed to the usual, the familiar, and, while her confidence in Bayard had been profoundly aroused, her inherent distrust of strangeness caused her to suspect, to be reluctant to accept his attitude without reserve. Looking up at her he read the conflict in her face.
"I'd better go now," he added in a voice from which the vigor had gone. "I..."