Page:Walpole--portrait of man with red hair.djvu/133

 doesn't mean that she's ignorant of life. There's nothing mean or sordid or disgusting that hasn't come into her experience through her beauty of a father, but she's stood up to it all—until this, this Crispin marriage. The first thing in her life she's funked.

"She's been saved all along by her devotion to one thing, her family—her father and two brothers. She must have given her father up pretty completely by now, seeing that it was hopeless; but her small brothers—why, they are the key to the whole thing! If it weren't for them she wouldn't be where she is to-night, and, as I have said, if the elder one had known anything about it he wouldn't have allowed it, but he's away on a foreign station and Bobby's too young to understand.

"She was always very independent in the village, keeping to herself. Not being rude to people, you understand, but making no real friends. She simply lived for those two boys, and she had to work so hard that she had no time for friends. She knew that I loved her—I had told her often enough. She saw more of me than of any one else, and she would allow me to do things for her sometimes, but even with me she kept her independence. To-night is the very first time in both our lives that she has begged me to do anything!"

"He stopped for a moment. "By God!" he