Page:O'Higgins--From the life.djvu/205

 take you home and to— Well, she asked me to be kind to you."

He sat up at once, frantically wiping his eyes. "Where is she? Where is she?"

"No." I held him by the arm. "You can't go and make a scene with her. You stay where you are till you've pulled yourself together. Besides, she's gone home with her people."

With that he began to curse her family like a truck-driver, even while he mopped away his boy's tears, abusing her mother in language that was beyond belief—delirious indecencies—the sort of language that you hear from a patient in a surgical ward coming out from under ether. I put my hand over his mouth, afraid that some one might hear him. "Shut up," I threatened, "or I'll throttle you."

He struggled with me a moment, trying to bite my hand, and then he collapsed again into hysterics. I scolded him in an attempt to get some backbone into him that way. "You young cad—calling decent people names like that! What 've you to do with a girl like her, anyway? Or any girl? You don't earn your salt—never did—never even tried to! If she's going to marry, she'll marry a better man than you—no matter who he is. I don't see how she ever came to look at you. Or how you ever had the—the effrontery to speak to her—to suppose that—that she—" He had come back to himself with a sort of shud-