“Don’t you know he didn’t get the letter? I was so nervous and over-wrought that I misdirected it.”
“Pooh! Has he ever stayed away from you so long before? Or his precious mother, either? Why doesn’t she come to see you? She scarcely missed a day before this happened. Nonsense! I guess he got it all right.”
“Steve, stop! stop! Don’t dare speak like that. Do you realize what you are insinuating? You don’t believe it! You know you don’t! Shame on you! I’m ashamed of my brother! No! not another word of that kind, or I shall leave the room.”
She had risen to her feet. He looked at her determined face and turned away.
“Oh, well,” he muttered, sullenly, “maybe you’re right. I don’t say you’re not. Perhaps he didn’t get the letter. You sent it to his office, and he may have been called out of town. But his mother—”
“Mrs. Dunn was not well when I last saw her. She may be ill.”
“Perhaps. But if you’re so sure about them, why not let it go at that? What’s the use of fretting?”
“I was not thinking of them—then.”
As a matter of fact, she had been thinking of her uncle, Elisha Warren. As the time dragged by, she thought of him more and more—not as the uncouth countryman whose unwelcome presence had been forced into her life; nor as the hypocrite whose insult to her father’s memory she never could forgive or whose double-dealing had been, as she thought, revealed; but as the man who, with the choke in his voice and the tears in his eyes, bade her remember that, whenever she needed help, he was ready and glad to give it.
She did not doubt Malcolm’s loyalty. Her brother’s hints and insinuations found no echo in her thoughts. In the note which she had written her fiancé she told of the loss of their fortune, though not of her father’s shame. That she could not tell; nor did she ask Malcolm to come to her—her pride would not permit that. She wrote simply of her great trouble and trusted the rest to him. That he had not come was due—so she kept repeating to herself—solely to the fact that he had not received her letter. She knew that was it—she knew it. And yet—and yet he did not come.