“She won’t wear them bronze pumps again, anyhow,” said Huldah in dour satisfaction. “She had to wear them out in the rain and now they are ruined.”
“Had to wear them out in the rain?”
“Yes, ma’am! The very afternoon we heard the bad news. Not an hour after them gentlemen was at the house to tell her about the doctor being dead. Nice gentlemen they was, too—them police officers.” She stopped, apparently musing on certain blue-coated figures. I had to prod her gently.
“Where was she going in such a hurry that she didn’t change her shoes?”
“Goodness knows! As soon as they had gone she grabbed a shawl and ran out the back door and across the alfalfa field. The last I saw she was scooting into the apple orchard and she didn’t get back for a full hour. It was raining, too, and she might have taken an umbrella at least. But not she! Catch her doing anything like a Christian!” concluded Huldah resentfully.
“Would you like some tea, miss?” she went on, after a moment’s brooding. “Some tea and one of my own cakes I made myself yesterday before she ordered them silly French things? Like as not poison, too, with all such coloured candies on top.”
“Indeed, I should, Huldah,” I said soothingly, though her cakes are, as a rule, sprinkled too liberally with caraway seeds. “And let me have a small anchovy sandwich,” I added, thereby winning her to a reluctant smile as she departed kitchenward.
I was not much wiser than I had been, and I really could not see that I could have questioned Huldah any further. Anyway it was likely she had told me all she knew, for Huldah’s natural disposition is to spread anything she hears.
I joined the other two in the study in time to catch a strained something in the atmosphere that made me pause involuntarily and look from one to the other. Maida was standing very stiff and straight, her eyes flaming like blue fire, her fingers clutched together until the knuckles and fingernails were white, and her whole attitude breathing defiance and anger and—yes, alarm. Corole was lying gracefully back in her chair, her creamy lace teagown falling softly away from her brown neck, the topaz on one hand catching light from the fire, and her strange eyes narrowed lazily in an expression so like Morgue’s that I almost gasped.
But as to that, resemblance to a cat or other animal is nothing to hold against a person, I argued reasonably to myself; there is a cashier in the City National who looks like nothing so much as a mild and woolly sheep and is yet, as far as I know, an upright and respectable man.