My mind went back to certain black-and-scarlet tragedies which Our Square makes brave pretense of having forgotten; tragedies of its unforgotten daughters. Terror enough, indeed!
“Was she some one you knew?”
No; she was not some one whom the Gnome knew. How to get to know her and help her (for help was his one, all-effacing, loyal purpose from the first moment he looked into her face); there was the heart of the problem. At any moment she might pass on, out of reach of his aid.
Yet to speak to her was too much risk. She sat poised as ready for startled flight as a bird. Into which deadlock of fateful chances intruded Susan Gluck's Orphan, aged six, and with a passion for scientific pursuits. The immediate object of his research was to discover what treasure so strongly interested a honeybee in a lilac bell, and if need be assist in the operation, his honorable purpose also being to help. Unfortunately the Busy One misunderstood and resented, whereupon Susan Gluck's Orphan lifted up his voice and smote the far heavens with his lamentations. To him, running in agonized circles with his finger in his mouth, the girl extended arms and invitation to come and be comforted. The voice, with its clear, soft, mothering appeal, tugged at the Gnome's heart-strings; to Susan Gluck's Orphan it was, however, but the voice of a stranger, and therefore to be feared. There, however, sat Leon the Gnome, unnoted before, but now an appreciated refuge. For to the young of the species in Our Square the Gnome is a delight, because of his athletic habit of using a child—and sometimes two—in evening dumb-bell exercises, for the upkeep of his mighty muscles. To his knees fled the wailful orphan. Gently though clumsily the Gnome extracted the stinger, in astonished contemplation of which the sufferer temporarily forgot his woes; presently, however, as the poison took hold of the nerves, lapsing again into woe.
All this the girl had been watching from the corner of her eye, making, one may guess, a private estimate of the singular-looking youth who had been covertly spying upon her fear and despair. Wise in a lore of which the Gnome was as ignorant as the Orphan, she now offered wet mud. It was applied, and the adoptive pride of the Glucks raced off to vaunt his wounds to his fellows, leaving two people with quick-beating hearts gazing at each other. The Gnome took a quick resolve.
“I have been frightened, too, in my time.”
“He is well over it,” answered the girl, following the now boasting Orphan with her gaze.
“I don't mean that. I have been hungry too.”
Now she understood, and drew back, flushing. But she, too, was one to go straight to a point. Perhaps two more direct spirits than those twain seldom meet. “You mean me?” she asked.
“Yes.”