Page:Lippincotts Monthly Magazine-70.djvu/97

Rh Hilliard smiled. "Poor fellows, they did their best; it's rather hard to hold them so cheap."

She gave a little shake to her head. She had hair whose silvery fairness not even the pink lamps could turn to yellow, fine-spun hair, each thread of it crinkled. "Oh, they liked the house and papa, as I said. Can't you think anyone might like to have papa for a father? But their feelings for me were tolerant and not highly colored."

"You frightened them," said Hilliard slowly. He had forgotten to look at her as a physician, he was thinking of her as a woman. "You aren't very big, but I think you are rather alarming. I know you'd frighten me."

There was a moment's pause. The music deepened its notes; they were very sweet and rather inclined to encourage ill-considered speech. Hilliard felt it and went with the tide. He had a grim sneer inside too; he thought himself a fool for his pains.

"You see," he began gravely, "you are spoiled; you don't know, you don't understand, how difficult it is to ask for things when one hasn't been used to getting them. You always get what you ask for; naturally, your demand is couched in vigorous language; but if you had been thrown down hard by life a few times, it would be different. I speak," he ended with a smile, "from experience."

"Do you?" The girl had slipped down on the bench that ran round the arbor. "Tell me about it." She looked up at him with such charming, eager eyes that he forgot that they had seemed hard to him before.

"Oh, it would take too long," the young man laughed, with half a frown; "till three years ago I never got anything else but knocks; they came right along. They were good for me, they made me tough, but they weren't amusing."

He paused; her eyes led him on.

"It began when I was about seven," he searched his memory. "My father and my mother both died and my grandparents took me; they were kind, but bored, awfully bored. They hadn't a child in the house for thirty years, and it was rather trying. They couldn't remember what a child did, so they gave me food and clothes and a bed, and that was all; they never thought of me in between the fulfilling of those duties. I remember hanging up my stocking one Christmas Eve; the servants had discoursed on Santa Claus. When I looked into it in the morning it was still empty. That was rather a facer, I can remember—it was rather a facer."

"Do you mean," said Miss Bagehot, "that it was quite, quite empty? But that was horrible!"

His eyes rested on her countenance; its dismay surprised him. He laughed.