A Struggle for a Ring — page 176: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

172 ALMOST FORGOTTEN. ‘¢Oh, Hettie, is it true?” sobbed the poor child—‘‘is he really gone? I had so much to say to him—he has been gone so long—and I—I wanted him to kiss me, and to say that he was sorry to leave me—it would have been something for me to have lived on all the long time that he will be away. I have been thinking all these long weeks what I should say to him.” ‘‘But, Alice, my dear,” said straightforward Hettie, ‘‘if you were so anxious to have said ‘good-by’ to him, why did you leave him? After all, it is quite your own fault— you know you came away. Why did you dothat? Why did you leave him?” Alice looked almost hopelessly at her—she could not tell her. She could not say to her that she had left him in anger because his indifference pained her so keenly; she could not bear it. She could not tell Hettie that, lest Hettie should say unkind and cruel things about him, and those she could not bear; she could only be silent and listen in her sick, sad despair. She caught Hettie’s hand in her own. ‘*You will never tell,” she said, as Hettie wondered at the burning fire of those hands—‘‘you will never tell, Hettie, or they will talk about it, and make surmises about it, until they drive me mad. You will keep faith _ with me, Hettie?” ‘“Yes; I am rough in my way, Alice, but I will help you—I shall never tell; I will help you in every way. I think, you know, though it seems hard to say so to a deli- cate little thing like you, that it isin a great degree your own fault. I should think that he had evidently some- thing to hurry about, and in the hurry he thought he had said good-by to you, when in reality he had not—that is all. He meant no- unkindness—he simply forgot; men. ‘comicbooks.: