Oliver entered the cabin, noting its simple appointments with his characteristic curiosity. Anna pointed to a chair which he took, although she herself remained standing. Her face was as white as her dress, her eyes deeply sunken, her manner sternly imperious.
“You are going away from Fraternia to-day?” she asked, with swift directness.
“Yes,” said Oliver, nodding with his peculiar smile; “this precious demigod or demagogue—whichever you please—of yours, your imperial Gregory, has issued a ukase against me, in short, has done me the honour to banish me from the matchless delights and privileges of Fraternia!” The last word was spoken with a slow emphasis of condensed contempt.
“There is something really a little queer about it,” Oliver continued, in a different tone. “I am on to most of what happened between my father and Gregory, but I’ve missed a link now somewhere. You see, the governor, in a fit of temporary aberration, offered Gregory a magnificent contribution for his socialist scheme down here; but Gregory was pretty high and lofty just then, and, ‘No, sir,’ said he—I heard him, though he and the governor don’t know it—‘No, sir, I couldn’t touch your money. I am just that fastidious.’ The governor had been confessing his sins to Gregory, the worse fool he! It seemed that his money had come to him in a way that might make some men squeamish, and Gregory, oh, dear, no! he wouldn’t have touched those ill-gotten gains as he was feeling then—not with the tip of one finger.
“But the joke is,” Oliver went on, “that he had to come to it. Oh, yes; he got down on his marrow bones to the governor here about three months ago, and wrote to him that he had reconsidered the matter, and saw his mistake,” and Oliver gave a low chuckle; “so the governor had to come down with the lucre, more or less filthy as it was, and I don’t think he was quite so much in the mood for it either as he was at the first, to tell the truth. But he sent it all the same, and sent me with it, don’t you see? I came as the saviour of Fraternia, although I have never been so recognized. The whole town has been run the last month or two on Ingraham money, and it seems to have greased the wheels about as well as any other money, for all I see. But now comes the unexpected! Off goes Gregory to England, sends back the governor’s check, so I hear from Everett, and kindly writes me to take myself off. What brought him to that is what I don’t quite see through yet.”
“I have no doubt,” said Anna, concealing her dismay at Oliver’s malign disclosure with a manner of cold indifference, “that Mr. Gregory had good reasons for thinking it better for you to return to Burlington.”
“You’re right there,” retorted Oliver, quickly; “oh, yes, he had excellent reasons, the best of reasons. A man who knows too much is often inconvenient, you know.”
“Mr. Ingraham,” Anna asked hastily, apparently ignoring this insinuation although she trembled now from head to foot, “I am not interested in the business relations of your father and Mr. Gregory. It was not to hear of them I sent for you. You brought me a letter yesterday which I think must have been not long ago in my husband’s possession. I wish you to tell me if, on the night when you found this letter, that is the night before last, you saw my husband in the neighbourhood of Fraternia?”
“Oh, yes,” replied Oliver, as if it were quite a matter of course; “were you not expecting him?”
“Where did you see him?” The question came quick and sharp.