She looked at him an instant as if puzzled, and then said: 

“I want to keep him from killing you.”

“Do you think he would take advantage of a helpless man?”

“I know it, Mr. Westerfelt; oh, I know he would!”

“Then you acknowledge he is a coward, and yet you—­my God, what sort of a creature are you?”

She continued to stare at him wonderingly, as if half afraid.  She moved suddenly into a moonbeam that streamed through a broken shingle in the roof.  Her face was like white marble.  In its terrified lines and angles he read nothing but the imprint of past weakness where he should have seen only pleading purity—­the purity of a child cowed and awed by the object of a love so powerful, so self-sacrificing that she made no attempt to understand it.  She had always felt her inferiority to others, and now that she loved her ideal of superiority she seemed to expect ill-treatment—­even contempt—­at his hands.

He looked away from her.  The begrimed handle of the bellows creaked and swung as he leaned on it.  He turned suddenly and impulsively grasped her hands.

“You are a good girl,” he cried; “you have been the best friend I ever had.  If I don’t treat you better, it is on account of my awful nature.  I can’t control it when I think of that villain.”

“He has treated you very badly,” she said, slowly, in a voice that faltered.

“Where did you meet him and when?” he asked, under his breath.  “God knows I thought you were done with him.”

“He came right to the house just after dark,” returned Harriet.  “Mother let him come in; she wanted to talk to him.”

“Did he come to get you to go away with him, Harriet?”

“Yes, Mr. Westerfelt.”

“And why didn’t you go?”

“Oh, how can you ask such a question,” she asked, “when you know—­” She broke off suddenly, and then, seeing that he was silent, she added:  “Mr. Westerfelt, sometimes I am afraid, really afraid, your sickness has affected your mind, you speak so strange and harsh to me.  Surely I do not deserve such cruelty.  I am just a woman, and a weak one at that; a woman driven nearly crazy through troubling about you.”  She raised a corner of her shawl to her eyes.

He saw her shoulders rise with a sob, then he caught her hands.  “Don’t—­don’t cry, little girl.  I’d give my life to help you.  Oh yes, do let me hold your hands, just this once; it won’t make any difference.”

She did not attempt to withdraw her hands from his passionate, reckless clasp, and, now more trustingly, raised her eyes to his.

“Sometimes I think you really love me,” she faltered.  “You have made me think so several times.”