“I have a long way to go and need a carriage, and I may as well drop you at home. Where must I put you down?”
She gave a street and number. The door was shut, the man mounted to his box and drove away, and they were alone together. Alone, except for the baby, but that was enough to make him feel that he and all the world beside were thousands of miles away from her. They drove on in silence. Now and then as they passed a bright light, her beautiful face, outlined by its dark hat-brim and darker hair, shone out from the shadow, but for which he might have felt himself in a dream interrupted by no sound, except the monotonous rumble of the wheels. Always as he looked her eyes were lowered to catch each passing glimpse of the baby’s face. She never looked at him.
He began to feel it necessary to ask one or two questions that he might know what to prepare for, but as he broke the silence to begin she said warningly, in a low whisper:
“Sh-sh-sh, he is waking,” and then fell to rocking and crooning over the baby and coaxing him back to sleep. When he seemed quite quiet again she said suddenly in a low whisper, and in the dark he felt her eyes upon him:
“What makes you so kind? No one is ever kind to me. I thought nobody cared. I had one friend but she went away. She did not want to leave me, but she had to go far off somewhere to make a living for her mother.”
“I will always help you if you will let me,” Noel said, whispering too, for fear of being silenced. “I will send my sisters to see you, if you will let them come—”
“Oh, no!” she said, interrupting him impulsively. “Don’t send any women out of the world you live in to see me. They are cruel—they have dreadful thoughts of me. They look at me strangely and suspect me. Oh, no—I’d rather take my baby to the end of the earth and hide from them. I beg you not to send any one to see me.”
Noel hastened to promise her that he certainly would not go against her wish, and was wondering how he should find out the things he longed so to know, when suddenly the carriage stopped.
The driver got down and rang the bell. As Noel was helping Christine to get out, the door was opened and the figure of Dallas appeared. It was a surprise to him, somehow, and an unwelcome one. How his spirit rose in abhorrence of this man!