“You know I could never pretend to any sympathy with your real tastes—books and music and musty old prints, and all that sort of thing.”
He laughed. “Well, I shall try again.”
His persistence goaded her to cruelty.
“If you want to know the truth, I like a man to be a man, as my brother is.”
His face twitched and sobered. “And I am not one.”
“Why do you make me say these things?” she cried resentfully. “You drive me to it, and then take credit, I suppose, for your larger nature.”
“I take credit for nothing,” said he. “My account with you is all on the debit side. Audrey, dear, please forgive me for having broken my word. It shall be the last time.”
“I believe it has been the first,” she said, with a rather quivering lip. “I will say that for you, Frank. Your word is your bond. Now do let us talk about something else. I came out to get rid of all that horrible atmosphere, of police, and detectives, and suspicions about everybody and everything, and this is my reward. The inquest is taking place this very day, and how glad I shall be when the whole sick business is over, and the poor thing decently buried, words can’t say. Now, one, two, three, and let us race for that clump.”
CHAPTER IX.
THE INQUEST
The Bit and Halter was seething with excitement. Its landlord, Joe Harris, selected foreman of the jury about to sit on the poor remains of that which, five days earlier, had been the living entity known as Annie Evans, had all the bustling air of a Master of the Ceremonies at some important entertainment. The tap overflowed as on an auction day—occasion most popular for bringing together from near and far those birds of prey to whom a broken home or a bankrupt farm stock offers an irresistible attraction. Here it was another sort of calamity, but the moral was the same. It turned upon that form of Epicurism which consists in watching comfortably from an auditorium the agonies of one’s martyred fellow-creatures in the arena. There are sybarites of that complexion who, if they cannot be in at the death, will go far to be in at the burying.