“I shall not like you if you begin to flatter,” she replied, with mock austerity, and an answering light in her eyes. “I am really a very perverse and wrong-headed girl, distinguished only for having never done any good at all. And anybody who says otherwise is not a friend, but a flatterer, and I am weary of false tongues.”
Miss Ethel came in while Reuben was still turning over in his mind the unexpressed meanings of these words, and with her entrance the talk became general once more.
The lawyer described to the two sisters the legal steps he had taken, and their respective significance, and then spoke of his intention to make a criminal complaint as soon as some additional proof, now being sought, should come to hand.
Ethel clapped her hands. “And Horace Boyce will go to prison, then?” she asked, eagerly.
“There is a strong case against him,” answered Reuben.
The graveness of his tone affected the girl’s spirits, and led her to say in an altered voice: “I don’t want to be unkind, and I daresay I shall be silly enough to cry in private if the thing really happens; but when I think of the trouble and wickedness he has been responsible for, and of the far more terrible mischief he might have wrought in this family if I—that is, if we had not come to you as we did, I simply hate him.”
“Don’t let us talk about him any more, puss,” said Kate, soberly, rising as she spoke.