Page:Richard Marsh--The joss, a reversion.djvu/206

194 I had not the slightest right to attempt to offer her consolation. I remembered to have read somewhere that you ought to know a man intimately for fifteen years before presuming to poke his fire. If that were the case the imagination failed to picture how long a man ought to be acquainted with a girl before venturing to try, with the aid of a pocket handkerchief, to dry her tears.

She kept on crying. It was a severe trial to one’s more or less misty sense of what etiquette demanded. Ought I to remain to be a witness of her tears? She might not like it. She might, very reasonably, resent being practically compelled to exhibit her grief in the presence of a stranger. On the other hand, to leave her alone to, as it were, cry it out, might be regarded, from certain points of view, as the acme of brutality. What I should have liked to have done would have been to take her in my arms, and comfort her as if she had been a child. In the midst of my bewilderment it irritated me to think of the asinine notions which would enter my head. Did I, I inquired of myself, wish to make an enemy, a righteous enemy, of the girl for life?

I tried the effect of another inquiry.

“Miss Purvis, I—I wish you would tell me what has happened.”

“Pollie!”

That was all she said; and that utterance was so blurred by a choking gasp as to render it uncertain if that was what she had said.

“Pollie? Who is Pollie?”

Quite possibly my tone was one of dubiety. Either that or the question itself affected her in a fashion which surprised me. She stopped as suddenly as if the fountain of her tears had been worked by some automatic attachment. Raising herself slightly from the couch, she looked at me, her eyes swollen with weeping.