“Sit, ladies,” said he, drawing up chairs quite as if he were doing the honours of the house. Then with a sly, compassionate look into each woe-begone face, he artfully remarked: “You’re all upset, you are, by what Mr. Cumberland said in such an unbecoming way at the funeral. He’d like to strangle Mr. Ranelagh! Why couldn’t he wait for the sheriff. It looks as if that gentleman would have the job, all right.”
“Oh! don’t!” wailed out one of the girls, the impressionable, warm-hearted Maggie. “The horrors of this house’ll kill me. I can’t stand it a minute longer. I’ll go—I’ll go to-morrow.”
“You won’t; you’re too kind-hearted to leave Mr. Cumberland and his sister in their desperate trouble,” Sweetwater put in, with a decision as suggestive of admiration as he dared to assume.
Her eyes filled, and she said no more. Sweetwater shifted his attention to Helen. Working around by her side, he managed to drop these words into her ear:
“She talks most, but she doesn’t feel her responsibilities any more than you do. I’ve had my experience with women, and you’re of the sort that stays.”
She rolled her eyes towards him, in a slow, surprised way, that would have abashed most men.
“I don’t know your name, or your business here,” said she; “but I do know that you take a good deal upon yourself when you say what I shall do or shan’t do. I don’t even know, myself.”
“That’s because your eye is not so keen to your own virtues as—well, I won’t say as mine, but as those of any appreciative stranger. I can’t help seeing what you are, you know.”
She turned her shoulder but not before he caught a slight disdainful twitch of her rosy, non-communicative mouth.
“Ah, ah, my lady, not quick enough!” thought he; and, with the most innocent air in the world, he launched forth in a tirade against the man then in custody, as though his guilt were an accepted fact and nothing but the formalities of the law stood between him and his final doom. “It must make you all feel queer,” he wound up, “to think you have waited on him and seen him tramping about these rooms for months, just as if he had no wicked feelings in his heart and meant to marry Miss Cumberland, not to kill her.”