“I can help more if you will only let me. I can teach a bigger class in Sunday-school now. I got to the book of Ruth to-day.”
“You did?” He pretended to be astonished. He was anxious to encourage her enthusiasm.
“Um hum!” She answered solemnly. A dreamy look came into her eyes. “Do you remember the part that you read to me the first day I came?” He nodded. He was thinking how care-free they were that day. How impossible such problems as the present one would have seemed then. “I know every bit of what you read by heart. It's our next Sunday-school lesson.”
“So it is.”
“Do you think now that it would be best for me to go away?” She looked up into his troubled face.
“We'll see, we'll see,” he murmured, then tried to turn her mind toward other things. “Come now, let's find out whether you DO know your Sunday-school lesson. How does it begin?” There was no answer. She had turned away with trembling lips. “And Ruth said”—he took her two small hands and drew her face toward him, meaning to prompt her.
“Entreat me not to leave thee,” she pleaded. Her eyes met his. His face was close to hers. The small features before him were quivering with emotion. She was so frail, so helpless, so easily within his grasp. His muscles grew tense and his lips closed firmly. He was battling with an impulse to draw her toward him and comfort her in the shelter of his strong, brave arms. “They shan't!” he cried, starting toward her.
Polly drew back, overawed. Her soul had heard and seen the things revealed to each of us only once. She would never again be a child.
Douglas braced himself against the back of the bench.
“What was the rest of the lesson?” he asked in a firm, hard voice.