"Where does my part come in?" she asked with a certain sweet directness which was sometimes hers. "Wouldn't I be a hireling too if—if I had anything to do with it?"
"No," said Mrs. De Guenther gravely. "You would not. You would have to be his wife."
IV
The Liberry Teacher, in her sober best suit, sat down in her entirely commonplace chair in the quiet old parlor, and looked unbelievingly at the sedate elderly couple who had made her this wild proposition. She caught her breath. But catching her breath did not seem to affect anything that had been said. Mr. De Guenther took up the explanation again, a little deprecatingly, she thought.
"You see now why I requested you to investigate our reputability?" he said. "Such a proposition as this, especially to a young lady who has no parent or guardian, requires a considerable guarantee of good faith and honesty of motive."
"Will you please tell me more about it?" she asked quietly. She did not feel now as if it were anything which had especially to do with her. It seemed more like an interesting story she was unravelling sentence by sentence. The long, softly lighted old room, with its Stuarts and Sullys, and its gracious, gray-haired host and hostess, seemed only a picturesque part of it.... Her hostess caught up the tale again.
"Angela has been nearly distracted," she said. "And the idea has come to her that if she could find some conscientious woman, a lady, and a person to whom what she could offer would be a consideration, who would take charge of poor Allan, that she could die in peace."
"But why did you think of asking me?" the girl asked breathlessly. "And why does she want me married to him? And how could you or she be sure that I would not be as much of a hireling as any nurse she may have now?"
Mrs. De Guenther answered the last two questions together.