“I must speak with you, Miss Diane,” he whispered. “Open the back door.”
It was only after making his demand that he realized how impossible it must have sounded to the distraught girl. It was the first time, since he had set out to see her, that it occurred to him how one-sided was the proposition. She had no knowledge of his resolve to thrust his aid upon her. He told himself that she could have no possible inkling of his feelings toward her; and he waited with no little anxiety for her response.
Nor was that response long in coming. She made another effort to dash the tears from her eyes. Then, half defiantly and half eagerly, she stepped up to the window.
“Go round to the door, quick!” she whispered, and moved off again as though she stood in imminent peril as a consequence of her words.
And Tresler was round at the door and standing in the shadow of the water-barrel before the bolt was slipped back. Now, as the girl raised the latch and silently opened the door, he slid within. He offered no explanation, but simply pointed to the window.
“We must close that,” he said in a low tone.
And Diane obeyed without demur. There was a quiet unobtrusive force about this man whenever his actions were directed into a definite channel. And Diane found herself complying without the least resentment, or even doubt as to the necessity for his orders. Now she came back to him, and raised a pair of trusting eyes to his face, and he, looking down into them, thought he had never gazed upon anything so sweetly pathetic; nor had he ever encountered anything quite so rousing as the implicit trust of her manner toward him. Whatever he had felt for her before, it was as nothing to the delicious sense of protection, the indefinable wave of responsibility, almost parental, that now swept over him. He felt that, come what might, she was his to cherish, to guard, to pilot through whatever shoals her life might hold for her. It was the effect of her simple womanly trust appealing to his manhood, unconsciously for her part, but nevertheless surely. Nor was that feeling only due to his love for her; it was largely the chivalrous instinct of a brave and strong man for a weak woman that filled his heart at that moment.
“There is a lot for us to talk about,” he said. “A lot that others mustn’t hear,” he added thoughtfully.
“What others?” Diane asked anxiously.