“What do you suppose he would do to you?” asked Valancy.
“Murder me,” said Cousin Georgiana solemnly.
“Just for the fun of it?” suggested Valancy.
“Exactly,” said Cousin Georgiana unsuspiciously. “When there is so much smoke there must be some fire. I was afraid he was a criminal when he came here first. I felt he had something to hide. I am not often mistaken in my intuitions.”
“Criminal! Of course he’s a criminal,” said Uncle Wellington. “Nobody doubts it”—glaring at Valancy. “Why, they say he served a term in the penitentiary for embezzlement. I don’t doubt it. And they say he’s in with that gang that are perpetrating all those bank robberies round the country.”
“Who say?” asked Valancy.
Uncle Wellington knotted his ugly forehead at her. What had got into this confounded girl, anyway? He ignored the question.
“He has the identical look of a jail-bird,” snapped Uncle Benjamin. “I noticed it the first time I saw him.”
“‘A fellow by the hand of nature marked,
Quoted and signed to do a deed of shame’,”
declaimed Uncle James. He looked enormously pleased over managing to work that quotation in at last. He had been waiting all his life for the chance.