“Yes; don’t be frightened for me, my poor little sister, I will not be unkind; but tell me truly, everything. You must not keep back anything, Margaret.”
“I don’t know, perhaps, if—you would call him a gentleman,” said Margaret, the color beginning to rise in her pale face. Keep back nothing! Would she have to tell him all they had said? Her heart began to beat faster. “It is Rob Glen, Ludovic; perhaps you remember him long ago, when he was a boy. I used to go fishing with him; he was very kind to me. Bell always says—”
“Yes—yes; it does not matter about children; but you are not a child now, Margaret. Have you always kept on such—intimate terms with Rob Glen?”
Margaret winced, and her face began to burn. He seemed to himself to be speaking brutally to her; but what else could he say?
“I did not see him at all for a long time,” she said; “and then he came back. He always said he was not—as good as we were. But do you think it all depends upon where you are born? You can’t help where you are born.”
“No; but you must be content with it, and keep to your own place,” said Ludovic, an argument which did not make much impression on his own mind.
“But he is very clever; he can draw most beautifully,” said Margaret. “The first time he came— It was—papa that said he might come.”
The name brought with it, as was natural, a sob; and Ludovic, horribly compunctious, patted his little sister on the shoulder with a kind and lingering hand.
“He made a picture of him,” cried Margaret, half inarticulate, struggling with the “climbing sorrow.” “Oh, Loodie! I found it just yesterday; it is him, his very self.”
“My poor little Margaret! don’t think me cruel,” said the good man, with a break in his voice. “I must hear.”