Johnson suddenly thrust a brown forefinger at her.
“Do you want to know what Sorenson did?” he demanded, wrathfully.
Janet gripped her hands together. “Yes.”
“You’ll not go spreading it all around the country? But I guess you won’t as long as it would make you out a fool too. I’ll not have Mary’s name dragged about in a lot of gossip.”
“I assure you I shall remain silent, for her sake and my own.”
“All right, I’ll tell you. You’re too good a girl––any decent girl is––to marry Ed Sorenson. He met Mary at a dance last spring in town where she went with some friends of ours, and made love to her but wouldn’t let her tell me or any one. We don’t get to town so very often; she never knew he was engaged 111 to marry you, there never happening to be any mention of it to her. Then he got her to go to Bowenville one day awhile ago, under promise to marry her there––Mary is only sixteen, a little girl yet. To me, anyway.”
Janet felt the working of his love in those simple words. Felt it but half-consciously, though, for her own soul was stifling at Ed Sorenson’s revealed infamy.
“When he got her there, he told her they would have to go away farther to be married––to Los Angeles.” Again his finger came up, this time to be shaken at her like a hammer. “He never intended to marry her; he planned to get her there, ruin her, and cast her off. That’s the sort of man you’re going to marry!”
“I remember he expected to be away for a couple of weeks––a business trip, he said. But afterwards he explained that it hadn’t been necessary to go.”
“A business trip! Yes, the dirty kind of business he likes. And if it hadn’t been that Weir heard him explaining to Mary that she must go on and interfered––there in the restaurant––Ed Sorenson might have succeeded. Mary trusted him, thought he was straight. But he’s crooked, crooked as his old man. When Weir told him to his face what he thought of his tricks, he let it out he was engaged to you. Didn’t mean to, of course. Weir said he would stay right with them and see that they got married next day before a minister, then Sorenson snapped out he was to marry you. That opened Mary’s eyes, that and his refusing to go before a preacher as the engineer demanded. So Weir brought her home to me.