Wint said insistently: “Just the same, Hetty, you’ll see I know what I’m talking about. Things will come out better than you think.”
She cried: “Oh, get out of here. Get out of here. You poor little fool.”
Wint went up to his room. Mrs. Hullis was still with his mother. He would wait till Mrs. Hullis was gone.
CHAPTER XIII
THE MERCY OF THE COURT
MRS. HULLIS stayed late, and Wint had time to do some thinking before she finally departed. But he did very little. He was in no mood for thinking. It was characteristic of Wint that when his sympathies were aroused, he was an unfaltering partisan; and there was no question that his sympathies had been aroused in behalf of Hetty.
It was equally characteristic of him that he wasted very little time wondering who was to blame for what had happened; and that he wasted no time at all in considering what Hardiston would say about it all. He was going to help the girl; he had made up his mind to that. The rest did not matter at all.
He counted on his mother’s sympathy and understanding; and when, after a time, he heard her showing Mrs. Hullis to the door, and heard their two voices upraised in a last babel as they cleaned up the tag ends of conversation and said good-by, he went out into the upper hall, to be ready to descend. Hetty had gone upstairs a little earlier; he could hear her now, moving about in her room.
His mother went out on the front steps with Mrs. Hullis, to be sure no word had been forgotten; and when she came in after her visitor had gone, Wint was waiting for her. She said: “Why, Wint, I thought you’d gone to bed long ago. I told Mrs. Hullis you were studying the law books up in your room. Mr. Hullis is a lawyer, you know. She says he brings his books home and sits up half the night, but I told her you were always one to go early to bed, ever since you was a boy. And she said she—”
Wint took her arm good-naturedly. “There, mother,” he interrupted. “I don’t care what Mrs. Hullis said. I want to talk to you about something that has just come up. Come in and sit down.”
Mrs. Chase, like most talkative women, was habitually so absorbed in her own conversation and her own thoughts that it was hard to surprise her. She took Wint’s announcement as a matter of course; and they went into the sitting room arm in arm, and she picked up her sewing basket and sat down in the chair she had occupied all evening, and began to rock primly back and forth while she stretched a sock on her fingers to discover any holes it might have acquired. “...do get such a comfort out of talking to Mrs. Hullis,” she was saying, as she sat down. “She’s such a nice woman, Wint. I never could see why you didn’t like her more. She and I—”