“A few seconds after you fainted, a strange young man picked you up in his arms. He said you were his sister. He started to carry you out and would have, too, if I hadn’t made the guard stop him.”
“Oh!” breathed Cordie, wild eyed, incredulous. “So that was what the guard meant when he asked where my brother was? Oh, how—how sort of romantic!”
“It may have been,” said Lucile in a very sober tone. “He may have been romantic, but he also may have been very bad. That’s why I thought you ought to know. He may be keeping a watch on you. Men who are fascinated by a face often do. You ought not to go alone upon the streets. You should not have been alone that day. No girl from the country, unacquainted with the ways of the city, is safe alone upon its streets and within its public buildings.”
“Why, I’m not—” Cordie halted in the midst of the sentence and began again. “Did you think—” then drawing her lips tight as if to keep in a secret that was about to escape, she lapsed into silence.
When she broke the silence a moment later the look on her face was very serious. “I do realize the danger,” she said slowly. “Truly I do. I will be careful, very, very careful. It was wonderful of you to save me from that—that man. How can I ever thank you enough?”
Hopping down from the bed, she wound her arm about Lucile and planted a kiss upon her forehead.
Just at that instant a question entered Lucile’s mind. “I wonder when her appreciation will reach down as deep as her pocketbook? That’s a sordid thought. I ought not to think it,” she told herself, “but I just can’t help it.”
Lucile was having to pay an increased rent on her room because of the girl’s occupying it with her. A pay day had come and gone, yet her young charge had shown no desire to bear her share of this burden.
“No! No! I mustn’t let myself wonder that,” Lucile corrected herself stoutly. “She’ll pay when she can. She’s probably saving up for her rent which is in arrears somewhere else. I do wonder, though, what she was about to tell me when she said: ‘I’m not—’ and ‘Did you think—’ I truly wish she’d tell me about herself, but I can wait her time for revealing.”
Half of the following day had not passed before Lucile repented having told Cordie of her volunteer brother. “He’ll probably never be seen again by any of us,” she told herself, “and now look at the poor girl. She’s all unnerved; grips her desk and stares in a frightened manner every time a man looks at her. And yet,” she reflected, “if anything happened and I hadn’t told her I’d never forgiven myself. Surely life is full of perplexing problems.”