“Not on your life. No pretense for me, Hel. Give me the girl who’s honest enough to love me, and let me know it.”
“Bill! How—dare you? How dare you say I loved you and told you so? I’ve—I’ve a good mind not to marry——Say, Bill, you are a—joke. Now, sit right down, and tell me all about those—those other things worrying you.”
In a moment a shadow crossed the man’s cheerful face. But he obediently resumed his seat, and somehow, when Helen sat down, their chairs were as close together as their manufacturer had made possible.
“It’s Charlie—Charlie, and the police,” said Bill, in a despondent tone. “And Kate, too. I don’t know. Say, Hel, what’s—what’s going to happen? Fyles is hot after Charlie. Charlie don’t care a curse. But there’s something scaring him that bad he’s nearly crazy. Then there’s Kate. He saw Kate talking to Fyles, and he got madder than—hell. And now he’s gone off to O’Brien’s, and it don’t even take any thinking to guess what for. I tell you he’s so queer I can’t do a thing with him. I’m not smart enough. I could just break him in my two hands if I took hold of him to keep him home and out of trouble, but what’s the use? He’s crazy about Kate, he’s crazy about drink, he’s crazy about everything, but keeping clear of the law. That’s what I came to tell you about—that, and to fix up about getting married.”
The man’s words left a momentary dilemma in the girl’s mind. For a moment she was at a loss how to answer him. It seemed impossible to accept seriously his tale of anxiety and worry, and yet——. The same tale from any other would have seemed different. But coming from Bill, and just when she was so full of an almost childish happiness at the thought that this great creature loved her, and wanted to marry her, it took her some moments to reduce herself to a condition of judicial calm, sufficient to obtain the full significance of his anxious complaint.
When at last she spoke her eyes were serious, so serious that Bill wondered at it. He had never seen them like that before.
“It’s dreadful,” she said in a low tone. “Dreadful.”
Bill jumped at the word.
“Dreadful? My God, it’s awful when you think he’s my brother, and—and Kate’s your sister. I can’t see ahead. I can’t see where things are—are drifting. That’s the devil of it. I wish to goodness they’d given me less beef and more brain,” he finished up helplessly.
Helen displayed no inclination to laugh. Somehow now that this simple man was here, now that the responsibility of him had devolved upon her, a delightful feeling of gentle motherliness toward him rose up in her heart, and made her yearn to help him. It was becoming quite easy to take him seriously.