"You'll pardon my saying so, but--you're very young, aren't you ?" "Not so--so _terribly_ young.

I'm almost seventeen," replied she, glancing this way and that, as if thinking of flight.
"You look like a child, yet you don't," he went on, and his frank, honest voice calmed her.

"You've had some painful experience, I'd say." She nodded, her eyes down.
A pause, then he: "Honest, now--aren't you--running away ?" She lifted her eyes to his piteously.

"Please don't ask me," she said.
"I shouldn't think of it," replied he, with a gentleness in his persistence that made her feel still more like trusting him, "if it wasn't that---- "Well, this world isn't the easiest sort of a place.

Lots of rough stretches in the road.