You're right
in trusting him and you can keep right on, to the last ditch--" He
stopped short again, with an inward thrust at himself for being so
blundering in his suggestions to this girl, who, for all he knew, might
be on her way to that "last ditch" from which not even Burns could save
her.
But the girl herself seemed to have paused at his first phrase. "What
did you call the Doctor?" she asked, turning her eyes upon him again.
"What did I--oh! 'Red Pepper.' Yes--I've no business to call him that,
of course, and I don't to his face, though his friends who are a bit
older than I usually do, and people speak of him that way. It's his
hair, of course--and--well, he has rather a quick temper. People with
that coloured hair--But you're wrong in saying yours is like his," he
added quickly.
For the first time he saw a smile touch her lips. "So he has a quick
temper," she mused. "I'm glad of that--I have one myself. It goes with
the hair surely enough."
"It goes with some other things," ventured Jordan King, determined, if
he made any more mistakes, to make them on the side of encouragement.
"Pluck, and endurance, and keeping jolly when you don't feel so--if you
don't mind my saying it."
"One has to have a few of those things to start out into the world
with," said Miss Linton slowly, looking straight ahead again.
"One certainly does. Doctor Burns understands that as well as any man I
know. And he likes to find those things in other people.
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