“He never got into trouble by thinking of his own idle pleasures, but because he was always thinking of the work he was doing for other people. And he has fared hard, and worked hard to make good everybody’s
“And you think that I shall never try to make good anything, Mary. It is not generous to believe the worst of a man. When you have got any power over him, I think you might try and use it to make him better; but that is what you never do. However, I’m going,” Fred ended, languidly. “I shall never speak to you about anything again. I’m very sorry for all the trouble I’ve caused—that’s all.”
Mary had dropped her work out of her hand and looked up.
There is often something maternal even in a girlish love, and Mary’s hard experience had wrought her nature to an impressibility very different from that hard slight thing which we call girlishness.
At Fred’s last words she felt an instantaneous pang, something like what a mother feels at the imagined sobs or cries of her naughty truant child, which may lose itself and get harm.
And when, looking up, her eyes met his dull despairing glance, her pity for him surmounted her anger and all her other anxieties.
“Oh, Fred, how ill you look! Sit down a moment. Don’t go yet. Let me tell uncle that you are here. He has been wondering that he has not seen you for a whole week.”
Mary spoke hurriedly, saying the words that came first without knowing very well what they were, but saying them in a half-soothing half-beseeching tone, and rising as if to go away to Mr. Featherstone.
Of course Fred felt as if the clouds had parted and a gleam had come: he moved and stood in her way.