“You’ll do nothing of the sort, you miserable coward. You are going to Viny Larimore this very morning, and confess what you’ve done.”
“No. I am not!”
“I say you are.”
“You don’t know what you are talking about. I’d never get out of her house alive. You never saw Vine when she was mad. I’d go back to Rochester—I’d—jump in the river, before I’d face her. I don’t have to stay here. Lettie has money of her own, that we could live off of. She doesn’t want to live in this ugly village, any way.”
“You could take your living from this stranger, this foreigner that nobody ever heard of? You—you say she is rich? Who are her people?”
“Father, won’t you—”
Calvin’s voice, a moment before raucous with assurance and determination, broke into waves of impotent pleading. He had perceived the flaw in his parent’s armour. To press home his advantage was the task of the moment.
“Her uncle is one of the leading business men of Rochester, and she has money in her own right. She’s been an orphan since she was six years old—sent over here from France by herself, after her parents died, and nobody to look after her. Father, won’t you go and straighten it out with Vine? Honest, I can’t.”
The elder Stone spat with disgust.