“Why, what’s the matter, Albert?” she queried. “I haven’t charged them with midnight assassination, or anything like that! Only, it seems that he has been making love to her, for some time, in his cool and self-contained way. I’ve known it, and she’s been perfectly conscious, that I knew; but never said anything to me of it, and seemed unwilling even to approach the subject. But to-night Cecil and I found her out in the canopied seat by the fountain, and I knew something was the matter, and sent Cecil away. Something told me that Mr. Cornish was concerned in it, and I asked her at once where he went.
“‘He is gone!’ said she. ‘I don’t know where he is, and I don’t care! I wish I might never see him any more!’
“You may imagine my surprise. When a young woman uses such language about a man, it is a certainty that she isn’t voicing her true feelings, or that it isn’t a normal love affair. So I wormed out of her that he had made her an offer.”
“‘Well,’ said I, ‘if, as I infer from your conversation, you have refused him, there’s an end of the matter; and you need not worry about seeing him any more.’
“‘But,’ said she, ‘Alice, I haven’t refused him!’
“That took me aback a little,” went on Alice, “for I had other plans for her; so I said: ‘You haven’t accepted the fellow, have you?’
“‘Oh, no, no!’ said she, in a sort of quivery way, ‘but what right have you to speak of him in that way?’ And that is all I could get out of her. She was so unreasonable and disconnected in her talk, and the others came out, and I tell you what, Albert Barslow, that man Cornish will do evil yet, among us! I have always thought so!”
“I don’t see any ground for any such prediction,” said I, “in anything you have told me. Her inability to make up her mind—”
“Means that there’s something wrong,” said my wife dogmatically. “It means that he has some sinister influence over her, as he has over almost everybody, with those coal-black eyes of his and his satanic ways. And worse than all else, it means that he’ll finally get her, in spite of herself!”
“Pshaw!” said I.