Page:O'Higgins--From the life.djvu/40

 treated me better!" And, "If I'd been a dog on the streets, some one—some one would have helped me—fed me—"

Life had taken her—young, pretty, proud, sensitive, ignorant—and it had betrayed her ignorance, sold her prettiness, cheated her youth, beaten down her pride, and stripped and tortured the raw nerves of her sensitiveness. She told him of it, as if it were being wrung out of her on a rack, in paroxysms of sobbing, in hoarse and shamed whispers, in dull, exhausted tones of desperation. He hunched forward in his chair, his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands. What was the use? He knew it. He knew it all. The world was full of it. It only sickened the heart to hear it. He couldn't live and think of these things.

She was silent at last. He heard her moving, as if she were preparing to go. "Well," he said, frowning at the floor, "I don't know what I can do." And then he heard her near him. She whined. And, dropping his hands, he saw that she was on all-fours at his side, panting up at him ingratiatingly, with her tongue out.

He sprang up. "Don't!" he cried. "Don't do that!" He tried to raise her to her feet. She licked his hand.

"Listen," he pleaded. "You'll be all right. I'll help you. I can make enough for two until you get something. You'll be—"

Her eyes were the dumb, devoted, appealing