“It’s very kind of you to bring the catnip, Mr. Sprague,” Ruth said. “Won’t you come in and taste Agnes’ Christmas cake? She is getting to be a famous cake baker.”
“With pleasure,” said the queer old man.
After Seneca Sprague’s old hut on the river dock was burned at Thanksgiving, and the Corner House girls had found him a room in one of their tenements to live in, he had become a frequent visitor at the old Corner House. Ruth would have ushered him into the sitting room where Mrs. Eland and her sister were; but Seneca shrank from that.
“I am not a society man—nay, verily,” quoth the prophet. “The sex does not interest me.”
“But it is only Mrs. Eland and her sister, who are our guests to-day for dinner,” Ruth said, as she led him into the dining room, while Agnes sped to get the cake.
“Ha! Those Aden girls,” said Seneca, referring to the hospital matron and the red-haired school teacher by their family name. “I remember Lemuel Aden well—their uncle. A hard man was Lemuel—a hard man.”
“I believe he must have been a very wicked man,” declared Agnes, coming back with a generous slice of cake, and overhearing this. “See how he let people think that his brother was dishonest, while he pocketed money belonging to the clients of Mrs. Eland’s father. Oh! we know all about it.”
“Ah!” said Seneca again, tasting the cake. “Very delicious. I know that you put none of the fat of the accursed swine in your cake as some of these women around here do.”
“Lard, he means,” whispered Ruth, for Seneca followed the rabbinical laws of the Jews and ate no pork.
“Lemuel Aden was a miser,” the prophet announced. “He was worse than your uncle, Peter Stower,” he added bluntly. “All three of us went to school together. They were much older than I, of course; but I came here to the Corner House to see Peter at times. And I was here when Lem Aden came last.”