Rose’s emotion changed to a crimson consternation.
“Why, William Vibard! what an awful thing to say. What little money I had put by was saved from years. What a thing to say about me and Uncle Gordon.”
“’Tain’t no such thing you saved it; you held it out on him, dollars at a time. You didn’t have no more right to it than I did.”
Gordon’s gaze centered keenly upon his niece’s hot face. She endeavored to sustain, refute, the accusation successfully; but her valor wavered, broke. She disappeared abruptly. He surveyed Vibard without pleasure.
“You’re a ramshackle contraption,” he observed crisply.
“I got as good a right to it as her,” the other repeated.
“A hundred and forty dollars,” Gordon said bitterly; “that’s a small business. Well, where is it? Have you got it?”
“No, I ain’t,” William exploded.
“Well—?”
“You can’t never tell what might happen,” the young man observed enigmatically; “the bellowses wear out dreadful quick, the keys work loose like, and then they might stop making them. It’s the best one on the market.”