Seasoned to his eccentricities as she was, she was startled by his answer. “Julia,” he said solemnly, “did you ever consider how many kinds of murder aren’t mentioned in the statute books?”
“Marius! What ideas! Remember Lydia!”
“Oh, I remember Lydia!” he said soberly. He went to lay a hand fondly on her shoulder. “Are you really going, my dear? I’ll walk along to the waiting-room with you.”
“Don’t talk her to death!” cried Mrs. Sandworth after them.
“I won’t say a word,” he answered.
It was a promise that he almost literally kept. He was in one of the exaggeratedly humble moods which alternated with his florid, talkative, cock-sure periods.
Lydia, too, was quite thoughtful and subdued. They descended in a complete silence the dusty street, blazing in the late afternoon sun, and passed into the inferno of a crowded city square in midsummer. As they stood before the waiting-room, Lydia asked suddenly: “Godfather, how can we, any of us, do any better?”
“God knows!” he said, with a gesture of impotence, and went his way.
Lydia entered the waiting-room and went to ask a man in uniform when the next car left for Bellevue.
“There’s been an accident in the power-house, lady,” he told her, “and that line ain’t runnin’.”