She looked at him an instant as if puzzled, and then said:
"I want to keep him from killing you."
"Do you think he would take advantage of a helpless man?"
"I know it, Mr. Westerfelt; oh, I know he would!"
"Then you acknowledge he is a coward, and yet you—my God, what sort of a creature are you?"
She continued to stare at him wonderingly, as if half afraid. She moved suddenly into a moonbeam that streamed through a broken shingle in the roof. Her face was like white marble. In its terrified lines and angles he read nothing but the imprint of past weakness where he should have seen only pleading purity—the purity of a child cowed and awed by the object of a love so powerful, so self-sacrificing that she made no attempt to understand it. She had always felt her inferiority to others, and now that she loved her ideal of superiority she seemed to expect ill-treatment—even contempt—at his hands.
He looked away from her. The begrimed handle of the bellows creaked and swung as he leaned on it. He turned suddenly and impulsively grasped her hands.
"You are a good girl," he cried; "you have been the best friend I ever had. If I don't treat you better, it is on account of my awful nature. I can't control it when I think of that villain."
"He has treated you very badly," she said, slowly, in a voice that faltered.
"Where did you meet him and when?" he asked, under his breath. "God knows I thought you were done with him."