“I don’t believe he can have been ill,” she said, at the top of her voice; “if he’d been ill he wouldn’t have had the strength to hit the cab driver so hard.”
“I don’t blame him for hittin’ the cab driver,” said Aunt Mary warmly. “As near as I can recollect, I’ve often wanted to do that myself. But I can’t make out where he got the man to hit, or why he was there to hit him. I can’t make rhyme or reason out of it. I wish we knew more. Well, I presume we will, later.”
Her surmise was correct. They knew much more later. They knew more from Mr. Stebbins, and they knew profusely more from the evening papers.
“I think our boy’d better have come home for his Easter,” Aunt Mary remarked, with a species of angry undertow threading the current of her speech. “There’s no sayin’ what this will cost before we’re done with it.”
Arethusa choked; it was all so very terrible to her.
“What is it that the cabman wants, anyhow?” her aunt demanded presently.
“He doesn’t want anything,” yelled the unhappy sister. “He’s going to die.”
“Well, who is going to sue me, then?”
“It’s his wife; she wants five thousand dollars damages.”
Aunt Mary’s lips tightened.