"I know it's tough, girlie." Charming Billy, considering his ignorance of women, showed an instinct for just the sympathy she needed. "I haven't had a chance to speak to yuh, hardly, for months--anything but common remarks made in public. How long does the toothache last as a general thing?" He took down the dish towel from its nail inside the pantry door and prepared to help her. "She's good for to-day, ain't she?"
"Oh, yes--and I suppose it does hurt, and I ought to be sorry. But I'm not. I'm glad of it. I wish her face would stay that way all winter! She's so fussy about her looks she won't put her nose out of her room till she's pretty again. Oh, Billy Boy, I wish I were a man!"
"Well, I don't!" Billy disagreed. "If yuh was," he added soberly, "and stayed as pretty as yuh are now, she'd--" But Billy could not bring himself to finish the sentence.
"Do you think it's because you're so pretty that she--"
Flora smiled reluctantly. "If I were a man I could swear and swear!"
"Swear anyhow," suggested Billy encouragingly. "I'll show yuh how."
"And father away off in Klondyke," she said irrelevantly, passing over his generous offer, "and--and dead, for all we know! And she doesn't care--at all! She--"
Sympathy is good, but it has a disagreeable way of bringing all one's troubles to the front rather overwhelmingly. Flora suddenly dropped a plate back into the pan, leaned her face against the wall by the sink and began to cry in a tempestuous manner rather frightened Charming Billy Boyle, who had never before seen a grown woman cry real tears and sob like that.
He did what he could. He put his arms around her and held her close, and patted her hair and called her girlie, and laid his brown cheek against her wet one and told her to never mind and that it would be all right anyway, and that her father was probably picking away in his mine right then and wishing she was there to fry his bacon for him.
"I wish I was, too," she murmured, weaned from her weeping and talking into his coat. "If I'd known how--she--really was, I wouldn't ever have stayed. I'd have gone with father."
"And where would I come in?" he demanded selfishly, and so turned the conversation still farther from her trouble.
The water went stone cold in the dishpan and the fire died in the stove so that the frost spread a film over the thawed centre of the window panes. There is no telling when the dishes would have been washed that day if Mama Joy had not begun to pound energetically upon the floor--with the heel of a shoe, judging from the sound. Even that might not have proved a serious interruption; but Dill put his head in from the dining room and got as far as "That gray horse, William--" before he caught the significance of Flora perched on the knee of "William" and retreated hastily.