“No, I thank ye, ma’am; I’ll swallow nothing o’ the kind, please.”
“What a mule! You won’t have a nip with an old friend, after so long an absence—come, Mildred, come; where’s the glass?”
“Here’s the glass, ’m, but not a drop for me, ma’am; I won’t drink nothing o’ the sort, please.”
“Not from me, I suppose; but if you mean to say you never do, I don’t believe you,” said the Dutchwoman, more nettled, it seemed, than such a failure of good fellowship in Mrs. Tarnley would naturally have warranted. Perhaps she had particularly strong reasons for making old Mildred frank, genial, and intimate that night.
“I don’t tell lies,” said Mildred.
“Don’t you?” said the “old soldier,” and elevated the brows of her sightless eyes, and screwed her lips with ugly ridicule.
Mrs. Tarnley looked with a dark shrewdness upon this meaning mask, trying to discover the exact force of its significance. She felt very uncomfortable.
The blind woman’s face expanded into a broad smile. She shrugged, shook her head, and laughed. How odiously wide her face looked as she laughed! Mildred did not know exactly what to make of her.
“But if you did tell lies,” drawled the lady, “even to me, what does it matter, if you promised to tell no more? So let us shake hands—where’s your hand?”
And she kept shuffling her big hand upon the table, palm upward, with its fingers groping in the air like the claws of a crab upon its back.