“You have been taught that language, which is more than I have,” he said; “I read it in English. Come, run over a few pages of the French to me.”
She shook her head and he slapped the book down on the table. “I don’t think much of your gratitude. Here am I half ill, or ‘sick,’ as you say in Rubicon Meadows, and you won’t do as much for me as you do for strangers.”
“What do I do for strangers?” she asked, falteringly, and stretching her neck around the door-post.
“You drove Miss Marsden’s headache away the other day. She told me.”
“Does your head ache? Could I do it any good?” she asked, wistfully, reëntering the room.
“No, no, birdie,” he replied, touched by her suddenly altered expression. “I have no headache; run away. I have made a vow that for the rest of the trip I shall see as little of you as possible. You need not look startled. You are not to blame, except for being the most prodigious temptation that ever flesh and blood was subjected to. I can’t endure you at all. I must keep away. I see now that I did wrong to bring you on this trip. It”--with a frown and a slight blush--“has led to disagreeable complications. I find that fellow Delessert has started some smoking-room gossip to the effect that I am persecuting you with unwelcome attentions. What? You are not crying? Upon my word, you laugh and cry as easily as you breathe.”
She was not crying, although she was cowering over the table with her head on her arms. At his question she straightened herself and showed him a pitiful, quivering face. “I wish I could comfort you, ’Steban. I wish I could stay with you, but--but I can’t.”
She was crying now--in regular torrents--and he muttered to himself, and stared helplessly at her. “P-please don’t touch me,” she gasped; “I will get over it in a minute. I am very sorry to disturb you, I--I--”
She wanted him to stroke her brown head, to show that he forgave her; but he restrained himself and presently she sprang from her seat and took the book from him. He stood holding back the curtains for her, as politely and formally as if she were a duchess, and she tottered from the room as unsteadily as the characterless Adonis had entered his the evening before. After she had passed her changed and impassive husband she flashed him a grieving glance, in which resentment, approval, and bewilderment were so strangely mixed that he involuntarily muttered a compassionate, “Poor little thing!” as he went back to his sofa.