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 fai