“I want to know what it is—— I want to know what you want with me.”
Janet sat up, raised her head, putting down her pen.
“Honestly, and without any more preliminaries?” she said.
Julia’s eyes gave a single dart of fire.
“No one ever said I was a thief. I want to know what you want with me.”
“That is what I call honestly,” Janet replied, and she put away her writing things for the second encounter, the first having thus been successful beyond her hopes.
CHAPTER VII.
“Well,” said Janet, when she found herself looking into the blurred and flushed countenance of the passionate girl. Julia had given vent, in spite of herself, to some tears, and had dashed them away with her hand or her sleeve, leaving a smear, and her hair was hanging wildly round her face, and there was a general air of dilapidation and ruin, though accompanied by few actual signs of warfare. She ought to have torn her frock from top to bottom to justify the general aspect of affairs, but she had not done so, and the smeared cheek and the ragged hair were the only physical certainties of the conflict past. There was still a pucker over each eye, but it was not an assured and dauntless pucker. The fortunes of war, for once, had not turned the usual way.
“Well—you have been behaving like a fool, but a fool has no meaning. When one can behave like a fool with a meaning I think there must be some sense at the bottom. If I am right, nothing matters that has happened; but if I am wrong——”
Julia stared with faint comprehension and much impatience. She said—