“Probably all married by this time,” Jack groaned. “Let me look at that cent.” He held it in the light of the fire, and gazed thoughtfully upon it.
“Not a one,” Dick assured him. “I met a chap from Tusculum last time I was in Butte City, and I asked him. He said there’d been only one wedding in Tusculum in three years, and then the local paper had a wire into the church and got out extras.”
“What sort of girls were they?” Winfield asked, still regarding the coin.
“Just about like that, for looks. Let me see it again.” Dick examined the cent critically, and slipped it into his pocket, in an absent-minded way. “Just about like that. First rate girls. Old man was as poor as a church mouse; but you would never have known it, the way that house was run. Bright girls, too—at least, my twin was. I’ve forgotten which twin it was; but she was too bright for me.”
“And how old did you say they were? How old was the youngest?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” replied Dick, with a bachelor’s vagueness on the question of a child’s age, “five—six—seven, may be. Ten years ago, you know.”
“Just coming in to grass,” observed Mr. Winfield, meditatively.
| ✳ | ✳ | ✳ | ✳ | ✳ |
Two months after the evening on which this conversation took place, Mr. Richard Cutter walked up one of the quietest and most eminently respectable of the streets of Tusculum.
Mr. Cutter was nervous. He was, for the second time, making up his mind to attempt a difficult and delicate task. He had made up his mind to it, or had had it made up for him; but now he felt himself obliged to go over the whole process in his memory, in order to assure himself that the mind was really made up.