Sarah began to laugh, and ran away from me and up-stairs to her room. The revelation worried me, and that very day I had a talk with my mother about it.
“Sarah will get over that,” said she. “All boys and girls have their little troubles. You had yours, and have recovered.”
“Not yet,” was my answer. “If it takes hold of her as it took hold of me, God pity her. I shall not fall in love again.”
“I'm sorry to hear you say that,” said my mother. “Jo treats you very badly. Sarah had a letter from her the other day, and there was not a word for you in it. They are in India, and intend to stay there for a year or so. It seems rather strange to me.”
“There's some reason—I'm sure she means well,” I insisted.
That evening McCarthy and I sat together in his room at the Delevan writing letters until midnight.
“Speaking of the ring in the bull's nose,” he said, “what do you think of that?”
He passed me a letter from a firm of New York lawyers in behalf of Maud Isabel Manning. They demanded that he keep his promise to marry the young woman or pay a “reasonable sum” in damages. That sum should be, in their opinion, forty thousand dollars.
“I'm in an awful mess,” he said, as he turned to me with a troubled look in his face. “There's a quotation from Ecclesiastes that fits the case pretty well:
“'I find more bitter than death the woman whose heart is snares and nets, and her hands as bands.'