The queer retort puzzled Stella.
The other, seeing the implied question in her glance, continued: “I should n't dare to ask him. He's too great and wonderful.” Again the transfiguring light swept over her coarse features. “It 's beautiful of him to let me do things for him.”
“What do you do?”
“I look after his clothes, mend and darn and buy things for him, and I dust his books and see that he has what he likes to eat and, oh, hundreds of things—just so that he sha'n't have any worry at all.”
A new pain began to creep round Stella's heart, one she had never felt before, one that frightened her.
“Tell me some more,” she said.
And Unity, her tongue loosened as it was with no one else in the world save Walter Herold, talked of the trivial round of her days and the Olympian majesty of John Risca.
“You must love him very much,” said Stella.
A glow came into her patient eyes as she nodded and fixed them on Stellamaris; and then a tear started.
“Does n't everybody love him?”