Green Girl Read Free Page B

children. ”
    “ I ’ m sorry, ” she said, “ I didn ’ t mean to stare rudely. It ’ s just that—well, it ’ s been quite a day and I—I don ’ t think I feel very well. ”
    His smile was involuntary and brief, but it changed his face in an unexpected fashion and she smiled back a little tremulously. His was the sort of ugliness which might have an odd attraction when you knew him better, she thought with surprise, but after that was content to submit to his efficient ministrations without further speculation. Whiskey was poured down her throat, her ankle bandaged, and her wet clothes stripped from her with little regard to the conventions of decency. She huddled, unprotesting, in her scanty undergarments until somebody wrapped her up in a thick masculine dressing-gown several sizes too large, and the redoubtable Jimsy set a bowl of steaming broth in front of her and bade her drink it before the chill of the hereafter settled in her bones.
    “ Now, Miss Jones, if you feel equal to taking yourself off to bed I can get down to my long-delayed dinner which, by this time, is probably uneatable, ” his master went on.
    She felt reproved again for having upset his arrangements and scalded her throat gulping down the remaining spoonfuls of broth in guilty haste. When she had finished, he watched with faintly twitching lips her efforts to negotiate the vast expanse of floor hampered by her injured ankle and the trailing, voluminous folds of his dressing-gown.
    “ I ’ d better carry you, or you ’ ll likely break your neck going up the stairs, ” he said then, and picked her up with the same careless ease he had displayed at his gates. He set her down at the end of a. corridor, and a fit of shivering took her as she waited while he flung more turfs on the fire in the room which had been allotted to her and turned up the lamp.
    “ I think I ’ ve caught a chill, ” she said in a small voice, at the same time catching sight of her reflection in a mirror. She had never had illusions about her appearance, which Matron had been wont to complain looked more like the popular conception of an orphan than the real thing, but even she felt dismayed by the waif-like face which stared back at her. It seemed to have shrunk considerably or her eyes had grown abnormally large, her hair which, if undeniably straight, had pleased her because it was fashionably blonde, clung round her neck in dark rats ’ tails of dampness, and the freckles she so much deplored stood out like a rash.
    “ Golly ! ” she exclaimed in such a heartfelt tone of horror that her host turned round to look in the mirror too.
    “ H ’ m ... you hadn ’ t realised how you might appear to a stranger when you stared so rudely at my ugly face, had you? ” he observed with a hint of rather sardonic amusement. “ Not, of course, that one would expect you to be looking your best after your unfortunate experiences. How old are you? ”
    “ Eighteen. ”
    “ Eighteen ... h ’ m ... and promised in marriage to the master of Castle Clooney, you say? ”
    “ Well, not exactly promised—but encouraged, if you know what I mean. ”
    “ I ’ m not sure that I do. One doesn ’ t come belting across the Irish Channel on the strength of wishful thinking—or did you invent this swain of yours? ”
    “ He ’ s not a swain, and I didn ’ t invent him, ” she said, shivering, and near to tears again, and his cool, appraising gaze softened a little.
    “ You undoubtedly have caught a chill, young woman. You ’ d better nip into bed, ” he said, and threw back the covers on the high, half-tester bed which looked enormous to Harriet ’ s unaccustomed eyes.
    She moved towards the bed uncertainly, expecting him to bid her goodnight and hurry away to his long-delayed meal, but he merely waited, and when she still hesitated, wondering if anyone had thought to lend her a nightgown, he picked her up again and dumped her in the bed with impatient finality.
    “