"But how any man can leave you----" cried Merriam, treading recklessly on several kinds of dynamite.
"You haven't seen her," said Mollie June.
Merriam was silenced. It was true he had not seen her. And he remembered with confusion that he had talked with her over a wire and, as Rockwell put it, had not "needed much prompting."
He stole a glance at Mollie June. The purity of her white-clad figure, its brave erectness, and the impassive sadness so out of place on her young face caught at his heart.
"How can you stand it?" he cried, and would have put out his hand to her had he not remembered that he was in bed and that his arm was clad only in the sleeve of a suit of pajamas.
Mollie June looked at him.
"I don't know," she said. "What else can I do?"
Merriam lay still, now openly staring at her. Of all intolerable things of which he had ever heard it seemed to him the worst that Mollie June--"the prettiest girl,"--with all her loveliness and sweetness and courage and youthful joy in life, should be so slighted and wronged and saddened and degraded. It was like seeing a rose trampled under foot. (Merriam's mental simile was not very original perhaps, but to him it was intensely poignant.)
For a moment she met his gaze, then looked away. In the subdued light Merriam could not be sure, but he thought there was a new brightness of tears in her eyes, released perhaps by his very apparent though inexpressive sympathy.
Presently the thought which had inevitably come to him forced itself almost against his will to expression: