"About his step-mother, you mean?"
"No, I mean about Jennie and Sadie. You might go and tell them what I said!"
"Yes, I might, if I were the villainess of a play and wanted to make them cut your children out of their wills!"
"You won't tell, will you?" Lizzie pleaded. "It ain't that I'd care so much (though to be sure, I'd like to think the children would inherit all they could), but it's Hiram would be so displeased at me talking to you the way I did."
"Don't give yourself any anxiety, Lizzie; of course I shall not 'tell.'"
Margaret reflected, on the way home, as, quiet and rather white, she leaned back in her seat in the train, pleading fatigue and a headache to escape conversation, that this day, somehow, marked an epoch in her understanding of the Leitzel family. She had suddenly, after two months of incredible obtuseness, recognized that they measured everything in life—duty, friendship, religion, love—by just one thing.
"Yet Daniel married a dowerless wife!" she marvelled.
The wild suspicion crossed her mind that Walter might have misled Daniel into thinking her an heiress, even as he had let her assume that her lover was well-born.
But she was instantly ashamed of herself for even conceiving of such treachery on Walter's part.