“If he knew he would not drive you away, would he?”
“He will never know.”
“Perhaps he may. Perhaps the person for whose sake you sold it may tell him.”
“Indeed he will not! I shall see to that.”
“Oh, then there is such a person! I was sure of it before. Now you have told me.”
Before I could recover from the mental disturbance and chagrin which my slip and her quick seizure of it caused me, the butler re-entered the room.
“Mrs. Colton is awake and asking for you, Miss Mabel,” he said. “The doctor thinks you had better go to her at once, if you please.”
With a word of apology to me, she hurried away. I rose from the table. I had had breakfast enough. The interruption had come at a fortunate time for me. Her next question might have forced me to decline to answer—which would have been equivalent to admitting the truth—or to lie. One thing I determined to do without delay. I would write Taylor at once warning him to be more close-mouthed than ever. Under no conditions would I permit him to speak. If it were necessary I would go to Washington, where he and Nellie were spending their honeymoon, and make him promise to keep silence. His telling the truth might ruin him, and it certainly would not help me. In the one essential thing—the one which was clenching my determination to leave Denboro as soon as I could and seek forgetfulness and occupation elsewhere—no one could help me. I must help myself, or be miserable always. Just now the eternal misery seemed inevitable, no matter what I did.
Johnson cleared the table and left me alone in the library. The hours passed. Nine o'clock came, then nine-thirty. It was almost time for the stock market to open. My thoughts, which had been diverted from my rash plunge into the intricacies of high finance, began to return to it. As ten o'clock drew near, I began to realize what I had bade Davis do, and to think what might happen because of it. I, Roscoe Paine, no longer even a country banker, was at the helm of “Big Jim” Colton's bark in the maelstrom of the stock market. It would have been funny if it had not been so desperate. And desperate it was, sheer reckless desperation and nothing else. I must have been crazier than ever, more wildly insane than I had been for the past month, to even think of such a thing. It was not too late yet, I could telegraph Davis—
The telephone on the desk—not the public, the local, 'phone, but the other, Colton's private wire to New York—rang. I picked up the receiver.