"All right. We'll talk it over later. But I warn you I shall leave you no possible room for refusing. Yes, Grace, I'm ready."
The Broughtons took Kittie off, bent on smoothing the path for her, and Miss Wolcott turned to Lyon with a sigh of relief.
"What a wild, unmanageable child! I should think that after all the trouble that has come from her act she would at least be a little subdued."
"Oh, it isn't all trouble," said Lyon, assuming as a matter of course his life-long privilege of being Kittie's defender. "Mr. Broughton came out to Waynscott fully determined to shoot Lawrence at sight. Being in jail probably saved his life,--so you ought to count that to Kittie's credit. And would you ever have known the measure of Lawrence's devotion if he had not had this chance of proving how far he could carry it? Then those letters of yours,--if there hadn't been a mystery about Fullerton's death, I should never have been spurred on to run things down, and if I hadn't those letters might have fallen into who knows whose hands! And Mrs. Broughton's unhappiness,--think of all the trouble and wretchedness those two people are saved through the accident of my being drawn into this Hemlock Avenue mystery! Even Fullerton's death alone would not have cleared the cloud from their lives. It needed the knowledge no one could give them but I,--and I should never have known how much the fact in my possession was needed if I had not met Mrs. Broughton in this curiously intimate way. Indeed, I should probably never have met Mrs. Broughton! Or you! Or Kittie! Or had the friendship of Lawrence. And when you think of each one of us, and how, through this strange tangle, we have all won what we wanted most, don't you think we can say, with Tiny Tim, that all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds?"
He glanced at her, smiling, for confirmation. Her face was so radiant that he thought he had for once in his life succeeded in being eloquent. Then his glance followed her eye to the window, and he realized that she had probably heard nothing of what he had been saying. Lawrence was swinging up Hemlock Avenue at a pace that devoured the distance.
"I--er--really, I must go," murmured Lyon, reaching for his hat.