And she fell face down upon the ground—the only mother she had ever known—a heart-broken, weary, lonely, sobbing child.
Nina Ide reached her before the others moved. Twice the girl fought her way out of her arms. Twice the sympathetic little mother-heart of the Castonia beauty conquered the rebel and retook her, whispering to her eagerly. And she held her tear-streaked face close to her shoulder, and patted the grimy little fingers between which tears were trickling. There was something inexpressibly pathetic even in the unkemptness of the stricken girl, in her torn dress and the brown skin of face and hands, touched here and there by the stain of exposure to the blackened forest. And in her loneliness, feeling for the first time in her life real sympathy from one of her sex, gathering with grateful nostrils the faint perfume that whispered of the refinement and comfort that her heart had sought almost unconsciously and had never found, at last the girl ceased her struggles and clung to her new friend. The waif’s true instinct was proving this friend’s sincerity more surely than the whispered assurances proved it. And Nina Ide bent to her ear, and murmured:
“We will hate him together, poor little girl! He is not a good man to have a girl’s love.”
“When the hysterics are all over,” remarked the Honorable Pulaski, sarcastically, “we’ll take the young woman off your hands.”
“You’ll not take her off my hands!” retorted Nina, with spirit. “She’s going back home with me.”
“You haven’t got any rights over her!” barked Britt.
“Perhaps, then, Mr. Barrett is ready to stand up and say what his rights are,” suggested Wade, with bitter hint of retaliation in his tones.
Barrett, pale with the illness that was seizing him, grew paler yet with anger and terror, for he feared exposure.