“Why so?”
“Why, you said so, at the time, you remember.”
“At what time?”
“Well, when you got your thousand dollars from—”
“Oh, am I never to hear the last of that thousand dollars!” Garwood exclaimed, dashing his paper to the floor. “Must I always have that thrown up to me! I wish I’d never seen it!”
“It isn’t that, Jerome, you told me you had paid mother’s mortgage with it, that’s all.”
Garwood looked at her angrily a moment.
“You’re mistaken there, I reckon, you must be mistaken. I said, perhaps, that I would pay it off with that, but not that I had. I did intend to, but I had to use the money in another place. I—” But he could proceed no further then. He was thinking of the big poker game in the Leland the night the state central committee met at Springfield.
Emily dropped the subject from her conversation, but she did not drop it from her thoughts. It was with her all that day, and it was the first thing in her mind the next morning, So incessantly did it recur to her, that, in search of relief, she went finally to the bank. She asked for old Morton, and when he shuffled up to the window, she made him go with her back to the directors’ room, haunted as it was with memories of her father.
“They sell mortgages sometimes, don’t they?” she asked as soon as they were alone.