"And the mushy fool me, forcing that herd of calves on old Dave at that scandalous price—after all, that's what really gaffed me the worst! My stars! If I could have seen that degenerate old crook again that night—but of course a trade's a trade, and I'd said it. Ain't I the old silly!"
"The door opened and the light shone out—"
I gently prompted.
She erected herself in the chair, threw back her shoulders, and her wide mouth curved and lifted at the corners with the humour that never long deserts this woman.
"Yep! That light flooded out its golden rays on the reprehensible person of C. Wilbur Todd," she crisply announced. "And like they say in the stories, little remains to be told.
"I let out a kind of strangled yell, and Wilbur beat it right across my new lawn, and I beat it downstairs. But that girl was like a sleepwalker—not to be talked to, I mean, like you could talk to persons.
"'Aunty,' she says in creepy tones, 'I have brought myself to the ultimate surrender. I know the chains are about me, already I feel the shackles, but I glory in them.' She kind of gasped and shivered in horrible delight. 'I've kissed the cross at last,' she mutters.
"I was so weak I dropped into a chair and I just looked at her. At first I couldn't speak, then I saw it was no good speaking. She was free, white, and twenty-one. So I never let on. I've had to take a jolt or two in my time. I've learned how. But finally I did manage to ask how about Chet Timmins.
"'I wronged dear Chester,' she says. 'I admit it freely. He has a heart of gold and a nature in a thousand. But, of course, there could never be anything between him and a nature like mine; our egos function on different planes,' she says. 'Dear Chester came to see it, too. It's only in the last week we've come to understand each other. It was really that wonderful song that brought us to our mutual knowledge. It helped us to understand our mutual depths better than all the ages of eternity could have achieved.' On she goes with this mutual stuff, till you'd have thought she was reading a composition or something. 'And dear Chester is so radiant in his own new-found happiness,' she says. 'What!' I yells, for this was indeed some jolt.
"'He has come into his own,' she says. 'They have eloped to Spokane, though I promised to observe secrecy until the train had gone. A very worthy creature I gather from what Chester tells me, a Miss Macgillicuddy—'