“How do you know about this?” said I.
“Papa asked me—if I had—any complaints to make—of Mr. Elkins’s treatment of me! What do you suppose he dared to tell him?”
“What did you tell your father?” I asked.
“What could I tell him but ‘No’?” she exclaimed. “And I just had a heart-to-heart talk with papa about Mr. Cornish and the way he has acted; and if his fever hadn’t begun to run up so, I’d have got the rubber, or Peruvian-bark idea, or whatever it was, entirely out of his mind. Poor papa! It breaks my heart to see him changing so! And so I gave him a sleeping-capsule, and came down through this splendid rain; and now I’m going! But, mind, this last is a secret.”
And so she went away.
“Where’s Antonia?” asked Jim, returning.
“I wanted to talk further about this matter.”
“I don’t like it, Jim. It means that the cruel war is not over.”
“Wait until we pass Wednesday,” said Jim, “and we’ll wring his neck. What a poisonous devil, to try and wean from us, to his ruin, an old man in his dotage!—I wish Antonia had stayed. I went out to set the boys wiring for news of washouts between here and Chicago. We mustn’t miss that trip, if we have to start to-night. This rain will make trouble with the track.—No, I don’t like it, either. Wasn’t it thoughtful of Antonia to come down! We can line Hinckley up all right, now we know it; but if it had gone on—we can’t stand a third solar-plexus blow....”