The pink crept into her cheeks. Her eyes menaced him.
"Are you trying to pump me, Billy Stark?" she inquired.
"Not for a moment. But you're guilty, Florrie. What is it?"
She considered, her gaze bent on her lap.
"Well, the fact is, Billy," she temporized, "I've got in pretty deep with that book. I wrote it as a sort of a—well, I wrote it, you know, and I thought I might get a few hundred dollars out of it, same as I have out of those novels I used to write to keep lace on my petticoats. Well! the public has made a fool of itself over the book. Every day I get piles of letters asking what I meant by this and that, and won't I give my documentary evidence for saying this or that great gun did so and so at such a time."
"Well, why don't you?"
"Give my evidence? Why, I can't!" She was half whimpering, with a laugh on her old face. "I haven't got it."
"You mean you haven't the actual letters now. Those extraordinary ones of the abolitionist group, for example,—can't you produce them?"
"Why no, Billy, of course I can't. I"—she held his glance with a mixture of deprecation and a gay delight—"I made them up."
William Stark, the publisher, looked at her with round blue eyes growing rounder and a deeper red surging into his sea-tanned face. He seemed on the point of bursting into an explosion, whether of horror or mirth Madam Fulton could not tell. She continued to gaze at him in the same mingling of deprecating and amused inquiry. In spite of her years she looked like a little animal which, having done wrong, seeks out means of propitiation, and as yet knows nothing better than the lifted eyebrow of inquiry.