Page:A Good Woman (1927).pdf/368

 "My poor child?" he asked, "what is it? Is it something I can help?"

"I don't know. I wanted to talk to some one. I can't go on. I can't . . . I can't."

He laid his big hand on her shoulder with a gentleness that seemed scarcely real, and, at the touch, she looked up at him, dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief that had been soaked with tears hours earlier. As she looked at him, some old instinct, born of long experience with unhappy women, took possession of him. He said, "Why, you've got a new dress on, Naomi. It's very pretty. Did you make it yourself?"

For a second a look almost of happiness came into her face. "Why, yes," she said. "Mabelle helped me . . . but I made most of it myself."

His other hand touched her shoulder. "Here," he said, "lean back against my knee and tell me everything that's making you unhappy. . . ." When she hesitated, he said, "Try to think of me as your father, my child. I'm old enough to be your father . . . and I don't want to see you unhappy."

She leaned against his knee with a sudden feeling of weak collapse. It was the first time any one had been kind to her for so long, and, strangely enough, she wasn't afraid of him any longer. The old uneasiness seemed to have died away.

"Tell me, my child."

The damp handkerchief lay crushed into a tiny ball in her red, chapped hand. For a long time she didn't speak, and he waited patiently until she found words. At last she said, "I don't know how to begin. I don't know myself what's happened to me . . . I don't know. Sometimes I think I must be black with sin or going