"No—it isn't that; it's only because you're sorry for me, just as quite a lot of other people are sorry for me," she said softly. "You mustn't think that I don't understand, or that I'm ungrateful; I shouldn't be telling the truth if I didn't say that it's quite the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me in all my life. But I don't love anyone—except my father—and Aubrey; I don't think I've got time to love anyone. So you mustn't speak about it again, please; you must forget it. And you can stay as long as you like—and the bill won't matter."
"But you'll give me some better comfort than that, Bessie," urged the boy. "I shan't always be poor; I shall make a great name for myself some day, and then I shall be able to lift you out of all this, and make you happy."
"I'm not sure that I want to be lifted out of it," she told him, smiling. "Good night—and forget all about it. You're my friend always, I know—and I want friends."
There in the dark garden, with perhaps an idea in his mind not wholly theatrical, he lifted her hand to his lips before he turned away; and she stood there, looking after him, with that warm touch still upon her fingers, and with her heart beating a little more rapidly than usual.
After all, it must be nice to be loved, she thought; to be made much of, and shielded from the cold, and from hunger and poverty; never to listen to anything but gentle kindly words; never to have to meet frowning tradesmen, or duns of any sort; never to trudge through the streets on Saturday nights, with the certain knowledge that your skirts were bedraggled, and your feet cold and wet, and that the money in the thin worn purse had come perilously near to nothingness. Oh—that must be good indeed!
She went back into the house—with a strange feeling that to-night something had happened that had changed her; she would never be able to make-believe any more as she had done. The touch of the boy's lips upon her hand had wakened something in her that had merely lain dormant; she cried out dumbly for her natural and proper birthright. The world held something better for her, and it was denied her; she found herself wondering, without being able to put the question into words, whether she would ever get that which belonged to her, by right of the fact that she was a woman, and young.
Mr. Aubrey Meggison came in presently, and insisted on telling her of a few shots he had taken that night on the billiard-table—illustrating his words by means of a walking-stick on the shabby cover of the dining-room table—and how he had completely "wiped the floor" with his opponent, to the unbounded astonishment of a choice circle which seemed to consist of a billiard-marker, a bookmaker, and a long-dethroned music-hall star. The triumphs of the evening, however, had not smoothed his temper; he complained bitterly about the monotony of bread and cheese, and pushed his food from him with a few elegant expressions of disgust.
"Tact and forethought—that's what you're lackin', Bess," he suggested. "You don't think to yourself what's the best thing to suit your brother, and your brother's appetite. Not you; the first thing that comes along'll do for him."
She bore his reproaches meekly, until presently he restlessly wandered out of the house again. He encountered his father on the doorstep; and Bessie heard a little wordy warfare between the two—Daniel Meggison protesting virtuously that his son should be in bed at ten o'clock to the minute—and that son suggesting airily that he knew what was best for himself. Then Daniel came into the room, not too steadily, but perhaps with the greater dignity on that account.