CHAPTER XII
HE left Reba half an hour later at the door of the Alliance. She had barely spoken the whole evening. He had suggested he'd rather she didn't speak for a while—told her he'd just as soon she'd "mull over" for a few days what he'd said to her.
"You must feel kind of upset, and surprised about me to-night, miss," he said, with his intuitive appreciation. "I know. Mine's not a very pretty sort of story for such as you to listen to. I'd rather what I've told you stayed with you a while, and soaked in, so's when you have to, you can talk to me gentle and quiet-like. If you don't mind, miss, I'll go away to-night, just remembering how you said you don't want to be unkind to me—ever, without risking anything else you might have to tell me to spoil it."
It wasn't perhaps a very "pretty sort" of story for Reba to listen to, shielded as she had always been; but it wasn't unbeautiful. Parts of it were more richly, stirringly beautiful than anything she had ever heard. It swept over her, after she had climbed to her room that night, and stood gazing out at the glow that the city's lights made in the sky, how drab her life had been—how cramped and stunted in comparison to the sailor's. Nothing big in it. No great devotion—no great feeling of any kind. She had been buried, and everybody inside the gray house at the top of Chestnut Street had been buried along with her, under layers of mean little self-centered
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