"Yes, I would," retorted Ann.
"No, you wouldn't," he contradicted her quite shortly. They were both beginning to lose patience with one another. "No woman ever could."
"I'm not a woman," explained Ann, "and I'm very smart. You've said so yourself."
"Not so smart as all that," growled Abner. "Added to which, it's time for you to go to bed."
Her anger with him was such that it rendered her absolutely polite. It had that occasional effect upon her. She slid from the arm of his chair and stood beside him, a rigid figure of frozen femininity.
"I think you are quite right, Uncle Herrick. Good night!" But at the door she could not resist a parting shot:
"You might have been my father, and then perhaps she wouldn't have died. I think it was very wicked of you."
After she was gone Abner sat gazing into the fire, and his pipe went out. Eventually the beginnings of a smile stole to the corners of his mouth, but before it could spread any farther he dismissed it with a sigh.
Abner, for the next day or two, feared a renewal of the conversation, but Ann appeared to have forgotten it; and as time went by it faded from Abner's own memory. Until one evening quite a while later.
The morning had brought him his English mail. It had been arriving with some regularity, and Ann had noticed that Abner always opened it before his other correspondence. One letter he read through twice, and Ann, who was pretending to be reading the newspaper, felt that he was looking at her.