“Can I help you bear it?” Rossie asked, softly, with a great pity in her heart for this young man who had given way like a child.
“No, Rossie, nobody can help me,—nobody,” he said; and after a moment Rossie asked timidly: “Is it Joe Fleming again?”
“Yes, Rossie, Joe Fleming again;” and Everard could scarcely restrain a smile, even in his grief, at this queer mistake of Rossie’s.
In her mind Joe Fleming was a dreadful man, through whom Mr. Everard had come to grief, and she ventured at last to speak of him to Beatrice as somebody of whom Everard had talked when he was crazy, and who had led him into a great trouble of some kind.
“And that’s what ails him now, and keeps him so weak and low, and makes him cry like a girl,” she said.
And then Beatrice resolved to help the sick youth, if possible, and that afternoon when she sat alone with him for a few moments, she said to him:
“Everard, I am quite sure that something is troubling you, something which retards your recovery. I do not ask to know what it is, but if money can lighten it let me help you, please. I have so much more than I know what to do with. Let me lend you some, do.”
“Oh, Bee,” Everard cried, “don’t talk to me that way; you will kill me, you and Rossie together; and you can’t help me. Nobody can. It is past all help.”
She did not at all know what he meant, but with her knowledge of what money could do, she felt sure it could help, and so she said:
“Not so bad as that, I am sure. You have probably been led astray by some designing person, but there is always a backward path, you know, and you will take it sure; and if you should want money, as you may, will you ask me for it, Everard? Will you let me give it to you, as if I were your sister?”