“I am so sorry it happened,” she faltered. “Do you forgive me?”
“Certainly,” he responded. “That should go without saying. I may also add, but for that affair I should never have known what a brave and daring little girl you are, I have to thank you profoundly for the life you have saved to me, useless though I find it, and wish also to add that hereafter it is to be devoted to you and your interests, if you will allow it to be so. If life and living were sweet to me, I should thank you for giving me a chance to continue them.”
Jess was puzzled at his words. She was too young, and had too little experience with the world, to comprehend them fully.
The entrance of the family interrupted the reply she would have made him.
But from that hour the friendship between the two ripened wonderfully. Each hour little Jess fell deeper and deeper under the glamour of a spell which she could not cast off—the glamour of a young girl’s awakened heart, with its sweet throbbings, proclaiming that it had learned its first lesson from the book of love, and the lesson enthraled her.
What Mr. Moore’s feelings were it was hard to conjecture.
One moment he hated all womankind, for the sake of the one he had found so fair and so false—beautiful Queenie Trevalyn, whom he had loved too well, and to his bitter cost.
Then he found himself softening toward one of the hated sex—little Jess, whose heart was as innocent and pure as a little babe’s.
He wondered if she would ever have the heart to draw a man on to declare his love, and then, when she found that he was not possessed of wealth, discard him as unconcernedly as she would a withered flower of which she had grown tired.
Had it not been for his cruel lesson in that unhappy past, he might have looked with favor upon the girl whom his uncle picked out for him to wed—might even have learned to care for her, though she was little more than a child, while he was a man of the world, too used to finding all things different from what they appeared on the surface.