“He made me keep all his accounts. I learned all about his affairs. Well, one day, looking over the books, I made a discovery.”
“Yes?”
She hesitated. Her face was still fiery. The image of the mumbling, quid-chewing Deacon, with the roundabout methods of arriving at his point, rose vivid to his memory. He remembered his childish strain to understand “Ole Hey’s” good advice. Pop! Pop! Pop! It was like the clack, clack, clack of the type-writer under Ruth’s nervous, unconscious fingers. But what was this she was saying to the accompaniment of the erratic automatic music?
“I discovered that he was cheating you, or rather your sister and Abner Preep, that he had always bamboozled your father, that the mortgage was more than paid off long before, aside from the work he had gotten out of your brothers and sisters.” She paused, then hastened on with a lighter tone. “So, of course, being a foolish, hot-headed girl, I wouldn’t stay any longer in his house unless he repaid you, and equally of course he refused, knowing I wouldn’t make a scandal, and so I went off to the only relative I had in the world—my mother’s sister in Portland, Maine. She was too poor to give me more than food and shelter. But my knowledge of book-keeping soon got me a place in a store. And ever since I have earned my own bread, Heaven be thanked.”
She was not looking at him now; her fingers were still lightly tapping the letters into combinations that spelled only embarrassment. “Perhaps I oughtn’t to have told you—but you won’t take action now, will you?”
“No, seeing that the money has been paid!” he cried, hoarsely, with a sudden intuition. He sprang up agitatedly. “You sent us all that money anonymously—from Maine!”
Her head drooped lower. “Oh, I felt I oughtn’t to say anything,” she cried in vexation.
“But you did, didn’t you?”
“It was such a trifle, anyhow,” she said, deprecatingly.
“It was a fortune then—five hundred dollars!”