He would seem poor, he would take the role of artisan, he
would shut himself up in these walls--perhaps I may guess why, but it
is his secret. I think of it no more.'" He caught her hand in his with
a gesture that he would have made one of gallantry, but that in its
tremulous intensity became a piteous supplication.
"I have said nothing, and will say nothing, if you wish it," said Rosey
hastily; "but others may find out how you live here. This is not fit
work for you. You seem to be a--a gentleman. You ought to be a lawyer,
or a doctor, or in a bank," she continued timidly, with a vague
enumeration of the prevailing degrees of local gentility.
He dropped her hand. "Ah! does not Mademoiselle comprehend that it is
_because_ I am a gentleman that there is nothing between it and this?
Look!" he continued almost fiercely. "What if I told you it is the
lawyer, it is the doctor, it is the banker that brings me, a gentleman,
to this, eh? Ah, bah! What do I say? This is honest, what I do! But the
lawyer, the banker, the doctor, what are they?" He shrugged his
shoulders, and pacing the apartment with a furtive glance at the half
anxious, half frightened girl, suddenly stopped, dragged a small
portmanteau from behind the heap of bales and opened it.
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