He looked so tall and beautiful, and his face had no expression of contempt or anger now, only distress and sympathy.
"I was suddenly put on guard yesterday, and could not get leave. I am going to-morrow," he said, not answering the first part, "but, oh, I can't bear to see you sitting here alone and looking so, so miserable. Mayn't I take you home? You will catch cold in the damp."
"Oh no, not yet. I won't go back yet," I said, hardly realizing what I was saying. He sat down beside me and slipped his hand into my muff, pressing my clasped fingers, the gentlest, friendliest caress a child might have made in sympathy. It touched some foolish chord in my nature, some want of self-control inherited from mamma's ordinary mother, I suppose; anyway the tears poured down my face. I could not help it. Oh, the shame of it! To sit crying in the park, in front of Lord Robert, of all people in the world, too!
"Dear, dear little girl," he said, "tell me about it," and he held my hand in my muff with his strong, warm hand.
"I--I have nothing to tell," I said, choking down a sob. "I am ashamed for you to see me like this, only--I am feeling so very miserable."
"Dear child!" he said. "Well, you are not to be--I won't have it. Has some one been unkind to you? Tell me, tell me." His voice was trembling with distress.
"It's--it's nothing," I mumbled.
I dared not look at him, I knew his eyebrows would be up in that way that attracts me so dreadfully.
"Listen," he whispered almost, and bent over me. "I want you to be friends with me so that I can help you. I want you to go back to the time we packed your books together. God knows what has come between us since--it is not of my doing. But I want to take care of you, dear little girl, to-day. It--oh, it hurts me so to see you crying here!"
"I--would like to be friends," I said. "I never wanted to be anything else, but I could not help it, and I can't now."
"Won't you tell me the reason?" he pleaded. "You have made me so dreadfully unhappy about it. I thought all sorts of things. You know I am a jealous beast."
There can't in the world be another voice as engaging as Lord Robert's, and he has a trick of pronouncing words that is too attractive; and the way his mouth goes when he is speaking, showing his perfectly chiselled lips under the little mustache! There is no use pretending. I was sitting there on the bench going through thrills of emotion and longing for him to take me in his arms. It is too frightful to think of. I must be bad, after all.