Page:Tongues of Flame (1924).pdf/291

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great heart. He paces in his cell. He raves and shakes the bars. He cries out for you. He expects nothing but you. He wants to see nobody but you. I went to see him tonight and he thought it was you. The look on his face when he saw it was not—oh, it was pitiful! It was terrible—terrible for me, you can imagine." And Lahleet's utterance was again swallowed up in tearful emotion.

But, in a good many things Billie Boland went by contraries, and she went by one now. Her heart, unrelenting toward her lover, softened toward this innocent victim of his graces; and pride did not permit her to be jealous of this abject little woman, so far beneath her in the scale of opportunity. The girl's own jealousy, of course, accounted for her vitriolic outburst and made it easier to forgive. Billie shook her head sympathetically, yet reprovingly. Poor child! Unfortunate, most unfortunate that she, this teacher of an Indian school, should have let herself aspire to Henry Harrington. She should have known better—such a bright and shining figure of a man!

"I'm so sorry for you. Oh, I am really," she assured, laying a sympathetic hand on the shoulder of the weeping girl, but to find it stiffen surprisingly under her fingers.

"Sorry for me! . . . But I don't want you to be sorry for me," Lahleet protested proudly. "Don't think of me! Think of him, I beg of you. And save him!"

But Billie, studying the flaming, tear-splotched face, grew suddenly suspicious. "He sent you to me—to make his appeal for him?" she questioned sharply.

"No! . . . No! . . . No!" cried Lahleet, spring-