"Excuse me, Miss Calthea," he said, "but I must go and look after my men in the cornfield."
Miss Calthea Rose sat up very straight in her chair.
"If there's anything you want to do, Mrs. Petter, I beg you won't let me keep you."
"Now, Calthea," said Mrs. Petter, "don't work yourself into such a terrible stew. You know Stephen doesn't like to have Lanigan pitched into; I'm sorry for even what I said. But that about his grave was enough to rouse a saint."
Miss Calthea was on the point of retorting that that was something which Stephen Petter was not, by any means, but she restrained herself. If she quarreled with the Petters, and cut herself off from visiting the Squirrel Inn, a great part of the pleasure of her life would be gone.
"Well," she said, "we all know Lanigan Beam, and if there's anybody who wants the peace of the community to vanish entirely out of sight, the responsibility's on him, and not on me."
"Mrs. Petter," said Ida Mayberry, appearing so suddenly before that good woman that she seemed to have dropped through the roof of the piazza, "do you know where Mr. Tippengray is? I've been looking all over for him, and can't find him. He isn't in his little house, for I knocked at the door."
"Does Mrs. Cristie want him?" asked Mrs. Petter, making this wild grasp at a straw.
"Oh, no," said Ida. "It is I who want him. There's a Greek sentence in this book he lent me which I am sure I have not translated properly; and as the baby is asleep now, there couldn't be a better time for him to help me, if only I could find him."
Self-restraint was no longer possible with Miss Calthea Rose. A red blaze shot into her face, and without deigning to look in the direction of the creature who had just spoken, she said in the sharpest tones of contemptuous anger: