She led the way to a small room off the library, its long French windows opening on a balcony.
“This room used to be a kind of a den, they tell me; so I’ve made it into one, the first thing, you see.”
There was a rug on the floor, a chair or two and a high mahogany desk which gave the place a semblance of comfort amid the general confusion. Miss Lois Daggett gazed about with argus-eyed curiosity.
“I don’t know as I was ever in this room, when Andrew Bolton lived here,” she observed, “but it looks real homelike now.”
“Poor man! I often think of him,” said kindly Mrs. Daggett. “’Twould be turrible to be shut away from the sunshine f’r even one year; but poor Andrew Bolton’s been closed up in State’s prison fer—l’ me see, it mus’ be goin’ on—”
“It’s fifteen years, come fall, since he got his sentence,” stated the spinster. “His time must be ’most up.”
Lydia Orr had seated herself in an old-fashioned chair, its tall carved back turned to the open windows.
“Did you—lose much in the bank failure, Miss Daggett?” she inquired, after a slight pause, during which the promoter of Famous People was loosening the strings of her black silk bag.
“About two hundred dollars I’d saved up,” replied Miss Daggett. “By now it would be a lot more—with the interest.”
“Yes, of course,” assented their hostess; “one should always think of interest in connection with savings.”