When Mrs. Parrot came, Susan was lying with closed eyes in the middle of a great white embroidered coverlet, upon which her shoes had smeared greasy, permanent-looking stains.
"Mercy," sighed Mrs. Parrot, "if you've killed the poor creature, nobody's sorrier than I am! But why couldn't you have laid her down on the floor? She wouldn't have known."
In certain respects Mrs. Parrot was invaluable to me; but then and there I suspected that Mrs. Parrot would, in the not-too-distant future, have to go.
Within five minutes Doctor Stevens arrived, and, after hurried explanations, Maltby and I left him in charge—and then made twenty-five an hour to Birch Street.
However, Susan's intuitions had been correct. We found Bob's four-room house quite easily. It was the house with the crowd in front of it. . . . We were an hour too late.
"Cut her throat clean acrost; and his own after," shrilled Mrs. Perkins to us—Mrs. Perkins, who lived three doors nearer the right end of Birch Street. "But it's only what was to be looked for, and I guess it'll be a lesson to some. You can't expect no better end than that," perorated Mrs. Perkins to us and her excited neighbors, while her small gray-green eyes snapped with electric malice, "you can't expect no better end than that to sech brazen immorality!"
"My God," groaned Maltby, as we sped away, "How they have enjoyed it all! Why, you almost ruined the evening for them when you told them you'd found the child! They were hoping to discover her body in the cellar or down the well. Ugh! What a world!
"By the way," he added, as we turned once more into the dignified breadth of Hillhouse Avenue, "what'll you do with the homely little brat? Put her in some kind of awful institution?"
The bland tone of his assumption irritated me. I ground on the brakes.
"Certainly not! I like her. If she returns the compliment, and her relatives don't claim her, she'll stay on here with me."