“My God!” breathed Jarvis. “I—drove her to it!”
“You’re right, you did,” agreed Mr. Bellows.
“You can’t do it, man. I forbid it!”
“Oh, y’ do; do ye? Wall, I don’t see how you’re going to make out to prevent it. The girl’s got a right to herself, and I’ve got a right to——”
“I shall prevent it,” Jarvis interrupted fiercely. “It’s inhuman—uncivilized, monstrous!”
“Well, that’s the way it struck me—at first,” acquiesced Mr. Bellows; “but the way she put it up t’ me kind of won me over. She’s a takin’ sort of girl, kind o’ good-lookin’, an’ innercent. W’y, Lord bless you, she’s no more idee of the way a man—like you, for instance—might look at it than a child. She wants to work out—for a matter o’ four or five years, she says; an’ she thinks she c’n get some fool woman to bid twelve hunderd dollars spot cash fer bein’ sure of a hired girl all that time—‘W’y,’ I says to her, ‘you might up an’ die,’ ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘so might a horse; but folks hes to hev horses!’ I tell you she’s cute an’ bright, an’ I’m goin’ to sell her to the highest bidder, same’s I agreed to.”
Jarvis was silent for a long minute, his eyes fixed unseeingly on the miscellaneous collection of shabby and broken furniture in the rear of the shop.
“Is it to be a public sale?” he asked coolly.
“Well, as t’ that, I can’t rightly tell you. I left the advertisin’ o’ the goods, an’ the date o’ sale to the young lady. I reelly hope you will call it off. I s’pose you c’n easy fix things up so ’t she——”
“Did she ask you to tell me this?” demanded Jarvis suddenly. “Tell me the facts.”