"How?" repeated Ellen grimly. "Well, when a lone female and a lone he-male ain't got nothin' to keep 'em apart but an alley-fence, and her with paint on her face till she looks like a fat sixteen, and food on her table every day as good as a two-dollar table d'hôte, what can you expect? I wa'n't surprised myself. Nor," she added quietly, "I don't believe your ma would be, Joan."
"Oh, but how it must have hurt her!"
Both spoke in low tones, as if the spirit of Mary Darcy might be lingering near enough to overhear.
"I ain't so sure about that," mused Ellen. "I ain't so sure! Your ma always set great store on havin' the Major comfortable—'Ellen,' she said to me that last day, when we knew what was comin'—'Ellen, be sure to keep him comfortable here at home, so he won't be lookin' for it somewheres else.' There's worse things can happen to a widow-man than gettin' married again."
"Oh, but if I'd been here to look after him myself!" wailed Joan. "If you had only told me what was happening! I might have come back and stopped it!"
"About as much chance as stopping a fire-hydrant that's blown the top off. You're a smart child, Joan, always was; but you don't stand a show against that woman your pa's married—nor I wouldn't want you to," she added cryptically. "You wasn't raised that way.—Anyhow it wasn't none of my business. And just remember this, child, it's none of yours. It's none of yours!"
After she had gone, a sense of something heartening and bracing remained with Joan; and as she brushed out her straight, heavy hair with new silver-backed brushes which bore her own initials, a typical Ellenism recurred to her: "There's nothing that makes a person contented with the place she's in like knowing she can go somewheres else if she's a mind to."
"At least," she thought suddenly, "I'm independent of father. Mother left her property to me—I can get it whenever I ask for it.... And now I understand why!"
Mary Darcy had been a very far-sighted woman.