“How perfectly dreadful!” shuddered Gila, shrinking back into the depths of the chair.  “But you know you mustn’t believe a story like that!  Poor people are always getting up such tales about rich people’s automobiles.  It isn’t true at all.  No chauffeur would do a thing like that!  The children just run out and get in the way of the cars to tantalize the drivers.  I’ve seen them myself.  Why, our chauffeur has been arrested three or four times and charged with running over children and dogs, when it wasn’t his fault at all; the people were just trying to get some money out of us!  I don’t suppose the little child was run over.  It was probably his own fault.”

“Yes, he was run over,” said Courtland, gently.  “I saw it myself!  I was standing on the curbstone when the boy—­he was a beautiful little fellow with long golden curls—­rushed out to meet his sister, calling out to her, and the automobile came whirring by without a sign of a horn, and crushed him down just like a broken lily.  He never lifted his head nor made a motion again, and the automobile never even slowed up to see—­just shot ahead and was gone.”

Gila was still for a minute.  She had no words to meet a situation like this.  “Oh, well,” she said, “I suppose he is better off, and the girl is, too.  How could she take care of a child in the city alone, and do any work?  Besides, children are an awful torment, and very likely he would have turned out bad.  Boys usually do.  What did you want me to do for her?  Get her a position as a maid?”

There was something almost flippant in her tone.  Strange that Courtland did not recognize it.  But the firelight, the white gown, the pure profile, the down-drooped lashes had done for him once more what the red light had done before—­taken him out of his normal senses and made him see a Gila that was not really there:  soft, sweet, tender, womanly.  The words, though they did not satisfy him, merely meant that she had not yet understood what he wanted, and was striving hard to find out.

“No,” he said, gently.  “I want you to go and see her.  She is sick and in the hospital.  She needs a friend, a real girl friend, such as you could be if you would.”

Gila answered in her slow, pretty drawl:  “Why, I hate hospitals!  I wouldn’t even go to see mama when she had an operation on her neck last winter, because I hate the odors they have around.  But I’ll go if you want me to.  Of course I won’t promise how much good I’ll do.  Girls of that stamp don’t want to be helped, you know.  They think they know it all, and they are usually most insulting.  But I’ll see what I can do.  I don’t mind giving her something.  I’ve three evening dresses that I perfectly hate, and one of them I’ve never had on but once.  She might get a position to act somewhere or sing in a cafe if she had good clothes.”

Courtland hastened earnestly to impress her with the fact that Miss Brentwood was a refined girl of good family, and that it would be an insult to offer her second-hand clothing; but when he gave it up and yielded to Gila’s plea that he drop these horrid, gloomy subjects and talk about something cheerful, he had a feeling of failure.  Perhaps he ought not to have told Gila, after all.  She simply couldn’t understand the other girl because she had never dreamed of such a situation.