“It was dishonourable—wicked and dishonourable.”
“If you talk like that, Mr. Piety, I’m off,” she rejoined, and she started away.
“Wait—wait,” he said, laying firm fingers on her arm. “Of course you did it for a good purpose. I know. You cared enough for him for that.”
He had said the right thing, and she halted and faced him. “I cared enough to do a good deal more than that if necessary. He has been like a second father to me, and—”
Suddenly a light of humour shot into the eyes of both. Sheil Crozier as a “father” to her was too artificial not to provoke their sense of the grotesque.
“I wanted to find out his wife’s address to write to her and tell her to come quick,” she explained. “It was when he was at the worst. And then, too, I wanted to know the kind of woman she was before I wrote to her. So—”
“You mean to say you read that letter which he had kept unopened and unread for five long years?” The Young Doctor was certainly disturbed again.
“Every word of it,” Kitty answered shamelessly, “and I’m not sorry. It was in a good cause. If he had said, ‘Courage, soldier,’ and opened it five years ago, it would have been good for him. Better to get things like that over.”
“It was that kind of a letter, was it—a catfish letter?”
Kitty laughed a little scornfully. “Yes, just like that, Mr. Easily Shocked. Great, showy, purse-proud creature!”