"Doesn't he! I wish he wouldn't. Were ever two brothers more unlike than he and Hazard?"
"They are different. Hazard is a royal fellow, but the less said of Frank the better."
"Yes: only"—
"Only what?"
The temptation of an appreciative listener has elicited many a secret which sharpest tortures could not have wrung from its possessor. Ease had no intention of disclosing to her friend the troubles which buzzed gnat-like about her ears at home; but the time, the place, and, more than all, his interested face and his often-proved sympathy won the tale from her.
"It all came about," she said, "before I understood any thing of it; and now I don't know the whole story. There is something about a will that I've no clew to."
"Really, this is an impressive beginning," Sanford said. "You don't mind if I smoke?"
"No. I noticed that aunt Tabitha acted queerly when Frank Breck's name was mentioned, or rather I remember it now; but it has always seemed as if every thing that happened at Mullen House was strange some way. I've always seemed to be somebody else, and not myself, ever since I came here to live."
"It is strange," Will assented. "It is a sort of ogre's castle, and your aunt, 'savin' yer presince,' is the ogress."
"Aunt Tabitha has always been a puzzle to me," Ease said, "and I never attempt to understand her ways."