The girl worried me, and it worried me more to think that after all my experience I was so foolish and sentimental that I could be worried regarding her. She had a comfortable home, a loving guardian, youth, health, good appearance, and, to a certain extent, fitted her surroundings. There was nothing of the ethereally æsthetic about her, and no stretch of sickly imagination could picture her as pining to be understood. Notwithstanding this, there was I longing to help her so much that, in spite of my health and an acquaintance that was only twelve hours old, I was contemplating entering society for her sweet sake. The fact was, this little orphan girl who had taken up the life her mother had laid down at dawn of day nineteen years ago, had collected my scalp, and was at leave to string it on her belt as that of an ardent faithful lover who never entertained one unworthy thought of her, or wavered in affection from the hour she first flashed upon her.
I desired to save her from such savage disappointment as had blighted my life, not that she would ever have the capacity to feel my frenzy of griefs, but remembering my own experience, I was ever anxious to save other youngsters from the possibilities of a similar fate.
The best disposal to be made of Dawn was to settle her in marriage with some decent and well-to-do man on the sunny side of thirty; but where was such an one?
Thus I lay awake, and heard the hours chime and the trains go roaring by, till all the household but Miss Flipp had returned. She entered from the outside, did not come in till after midnight, and was not alone. Her uncle accompanied her. My room had French lights opening into the garden in the same way as Miss Flipp's, and as my ailment was a heart affection it was sometimes necessary for me to go outside to get sufficient air, and in this instance I had the door-windows wide open and the bed pulled almost to the opening. Miss Flipp apparently had her window open too, for despite the conversation in her room being in subdued tones, I heard it where I lay.
It contained startling disclosures anent these two persons' relations and characters, and when Mr Pornsch went his way with the uneven footsteps of the overfed and of accumulating years, he left me in a painful state of perturbation.
What course should I pursue?
Casting on a pair of slippers and a heavy cloak, I took a little path leading from my window through the garden to the pier where the boats were moored, and here I sat down to consider. Experience had taught me to be chary of entering matters that did not concern me, but it had not made me sufficiently callous to preserve my equanimity in face of a discovery so serious as this.
Miss Flipp had sinned the sin which, if discovered, put a great gulf 'twixt her and Grandma Clay, Dawn, Carry, and myself, but which would not prevent her fellow-sinner from associating with us on more than terms of equality. Should Grandma Clay become aware of what I knew, she certainly would bundle the girl out neck and crop, as she would be justified in doing. But the girl was in a ghastly predicament, and more sinned against than sinning, when one heard her grief and remembered the age of her betrayer, which should have made him the protector instead of the seducer of young women.
Times out of number the dramatic critics have termed me an artist of the first rank, and it is this temperament which furnishes the faculty of regarding all shades and consequences of life's issues unabashed, and with the power to distil knowledge from good and bad and use it experimentally, rather than, as a judge, condemnatory.
I determined to keep the girl's secret, and show myself sympathetically friendly otherwise, hoping she would extend me her confidence, so that in a humble way I might be privileged to stand between her and perdition.