She clung to his arm without speaking, and as they sauntered out to the street he muttered, “I mustn’t bother her with talk. She won’t slip back into that state again.”
Passing quietly by one door after another, they came suddenly upon a slight, gentle-faced young man with a weak, irresolute mouth, who stole like a ghost around the corner and put his foot on the lower step of a small house with dormer windows.
Camperdown looked at him narrowly without speaking, but in an instant Stargarde’s hand was on his shoulder. “Charlie, you are not going in there!”
He blushed, frowned, and bit his lip.
“Now for the last time I speak to you about it,” said Stargarde. “I want you to decide tonight. Will you not promise me—this is my wedding night, you know. One can refuse nothing to a bride.”
A bride, and such a bride—and on those upper streets by those stealthily closed houses. The boy, for he was scarcely more than that, looked strangely at her. The cool night wind came sweeping down the street blowing to his ears the striking of a distant bell.
“Charlie,” breathed Stargarde in tones of supplication, “you must promise me. You were once such a good boy; and your father—I think,” she said, putting up one of her white hands to her face, “that he was one of the best men that God ever made. Every one loved him.”
The young man saw with manifest distress the tears trickling down between her fingers. “For Heaven’s sake, Miss Turner, compose yourself[yourself],” he said. “Come, I will walk back a little way with you.”
“Promise her, boy,” said Camperdown, coming up and clapping his hand on the young man’s other shoulder.
“Your sister and your mother,” whispered Stargarde, “you are breaking their hearts.”