"Listen," said Lydia Sampson; "you must get married right off. You can't wait until December. That's settled. But your father must manage it so that nobody will suspect—anything. Understand?"
"I mean to do that, anyway, but—"
"Unless you tell a great many small stories," said little, truthful Miss Lydia, "you can't manage it; but your father will just tell one big story, about business or something. Gentlemen can always tell stories about business, and you can't find 'em out. The way we do about headaches. Mr. Smith will say business makes it necessary for him to hurry the wedding up so he can go away to—any place. See?"
Mary saw, but she shook her head. "He'll kill Carl," she said again.
"No, he won't," said Miss Lydia, "because then everything would come out; and, besides, he'd get hanged."
Again there was a long silence; then Mary said, suddenly, violently:
"Well—tell him."
"Oh, my!" said Miss Lydia, "my! my!"
But she got up, took the child's soft, shrinking hand, and together in the hazy silence of the summer night they walked—Miss Lydia hurrying forward, Mary holding back—between the iron gates and up the driveway to the great house.
Talk about facing the cannon's mouth! When Miss Sampson came into the new Mr. Smith's library he was sitting in a circle of lamplight at his big table, writing and smoking. He looked up at her with a resigned shrug. "Wants something done to her confounded house!" he thought. But he put down his cigar, got on his feet, and said, in his genial, wealthy way: