It wasn't long until the something happened. I had dropped down on the hall settee, in the end of it next to the coat-rack, and when Mrs. Sheila came down-stairs and went through the hall, she didn't see me. A second later I heard the boss jump up and say, "At last! It seems as if you had been gone a year rather than a fortnight," and then Maisie Ann came dodging out and plunked herself down on the settee beside me.
You needn't tell me that we had no right to sit there listening; I know it well enough. On the other hand, I was just shirky enough to shift the responsibility to Maisie Ann. She didn't make any move to duck, so I didn't.
"You came out to see Cousin Basil?" Mrs. Sheila was saying to the boss. And then: "He had a telephone call from the Bullard, and he asked me to tell you to wait." After that, I guess she sat down to help him wait, for pretty soon we heard her say: "Cousin Basil has told me a little about the new trouble: have you been having another bad quarter of an hour?"
"The worst of the lot," the boss said gravely, and from that he went on to tell her about the Hatch visit and what had come of it; how the grafters had a new claw hold on him, now, made possible by an unwarranted piece of meddling on the part of the New York people in the political game.
It was while he was talking about this that Maisie Ann grabbed me by the wrist and dragged me bodily into the darkened front parlor, the door to which was just on the other side of the coat rack. I thought she had come to her right senses, at last, and was making the shift to break off the eavesdropping. That being the case, I was simply horrified when I found that she was merely fixing it so that we could both see and hear. The sliding doors between the two parlors were cracked open about an inch, and before I realized what she was doing she had pulled me down on the floor beside her, right in front of that crack.
"If you move or make a noise, I'll scream and they'll come in here and find us both!" she hissed in my ear; and because I didn't know what else to do with such a kiddish little termagent, I sat still. It was dastardly, I know; but what was I to do?
The first thing we saw was that the two in the other room were sitting at opposite sides of the fire. Mrs. Sheila was awfully pretty; prettier than I had ever seen her, because she had a lot more color in her face, and her eyes had that warm glow in them that even the grayest eyes can get when there is a human soul behind them, and the soul has got itself stirred up about something.
When the boss finished telling her about the Hatch talk, she said: "You mean that Mr. Dunton and his associates sent somebody out here to influence the election?"
The boss looked up sort of quick.
"Yes; that is it, precisely. But how did you know?"