Finally, Mrs. Winslow, with a mighty effort to restrain herself, advanced and asked the young man if he would not please give her the name of the person to whom she was indebted for the articles.
He arose, and smiling blandly, remarked, "You didn't used to be so particular about presents and such things!" Then he added with a meaning leer: "At Helena and St. Louis, ye know, old girl!"
"Old girl!" the ladies all screamed. "Why what does this mean, Mrs. Winslow?"
"Nothing, nothing!" she replied hastily; and then she hurried the too talkative young fellow away, and came back into the room with a show of gayety. But it broke up the little party, and soon after the ladies, with frigid excuses about not having very much time, and the gentlemen, with peculiar glances out of the corners of their eyes towards the woman who had been so familiarly termed an "old girl," took their departure, leaving Bristol, Fox, Mrs. Winslow and the melancholy pile of packages surmounted by aromatic red herrings in a state of solemn, moody silence.
Bristol was first to break the stillness, which he did by asking rather testily:
"You think Fox and I have had something to do with this, don't you?"
She looked at him a moment as if she would read his innermost thoughts, and replied: "No, I don't! It comes from some of those strumpets of mediums, and I would give a good deal—a good deal, mind you, Bristol!—to know who it was. I'd—I'd——"
"What would you do?" asked Fox, putting her on her mettle for a savage answer.
"I would either burn them out, poison them, push them over the falls, or lie in wait for them and shoot them!"