"Sir, it is customary in these days to instruct young ladies in the knowledge of imparting medical aid to the sick or wounded. A moment since I saw you fall to the floor! I lanced myself to your side!—I debuttoned your paletot—sprinkled on your forehead water from that vase upon the table,"—she indicated the ornament with an infinitesimal forefinger,—"and in a few minutes I have the relief to behold you sufficiently recovered to demand if a man has shooted you? ... Naturally, I do not mean to be unkind! But the promise not to speak of this to Mademoiselle, your sister, see you well?—I cannot give it! Young ladies"—there was an appalling stateliness about the tone and manner of this delivery, worthy of a mistress of deportment—"young ladies do not have secrets with strange young gentlemen! And Monica is my dear friend, not you!"
"Then if she is so much a friend of yours, you would wish to spare her knowledge of things certain to shock and grieve her. You would not like to have her anxious and worried about what she couldn't help, would you?" His eyes constrained and besought. His voice was humbly entreating....
Juliette recognized the cunning in this appeal. She lowered her little pointed chin and leveled her thick straight eyelashes at the speaker. "Yes!" the chin said: "No!" the eyelashes replied. Thus encouraged, P. C. Breagh had an inspiration.
"But if I trust you!—you look as if you could be trusted...."
From her little neck in its plain white frill to the cloud of dusky hair that crowned her, she flushed rosy as Alpine snows at sunset. Did he mean to insult, or ingratiate, this overbearing, shaggy youth? She said, with delicate reproof, completely lost upon his bluntness:
"My father has honored me with his confidence, as long as I can remember, sir."
"Then I'll risk mine with you!" said P. C. Breagh.
"Not risk!" She had lost her glow, the sapphires of her eyes were shadowed by the blackness of the lowered lashes. "Do not say risk, for that is to gamble. See you—I will be trusted absolutely, or I will not be trusted at all!"
He understood, in part, that he had wounded, and awkwardly begged her pardon, ending: "And show that you forgive me by letting me tell you that I wouldn't have my sister know, for the world!" He got up and went to one of the white-curtained, ground-glass-filled windows, that masked the outlook upon Kensington Square, and said still more awkwardly:
"You see—you must have already seen from my togs—that I am a beggar. I came back from Germany three days ago to find myself one. I was to receive a fortune from the hands of trustees, and I found that their firm had gone bankrupt. The elder partner had committed suicide—the younger had shot the moon. My thousands in his pockets!" He ground his teeth. "And if I live—and ever meet that fellow!—he'll pay me in inches of skin!"