“Give it to me!” Jack repeated angrily. “Does she think me a pauper? and as to atonement, nothing can atone,—certainly not money.”
He spoke bitterly, and rising from his chair, for he was now able to be up, walked to the window, where he stood looking out upon the dreary landscape with a face sad and stern.
“Talking of pay,” he said, turning suddenly to Annie, “I can never repay you for all you have been to me in the darkest hours of my life, and the trouble and care I have brought to you. But I shall never forget it. As soon as I am able I am going away from Lovering for awhile. I cannot be here on Christmas day. When I come back I shall be the same old Jack you used to know, with the past buried so deep that it will never be unearthed. I shall do nothing with the house at present. I cannot even go into it, but shall leave it in your care and Norah’s. I think I shall go to Florida into the sunshine. I have not felt warm since that day at The Plateau. No matter how high my fever ran I was conscious of a cold lump like ice at my heart which nothing could melt. Sometimes when you put your hand on my forehead and when you thought I was asleep and said ‘Poor Jack,’ it melted a little. God bless you, Annie. You were to have been my sister. I hold you my sister still,—the best a man ever had.”
He laid his hand caressingly upon her head as she stood by him, a little drooping figure, wholly unlike the queenly Fanny in her personelle, but so much truer and nobler in every womanly instinct.
Within a week after this conversation Jack left Lovering for Florida, under whose sunny skies he hoped to recuperate both in mind and body. Before going he had a long interview with Miss Errington, of whom he had seen but little, and for whom he had a natural prejudice. This, however, wore away as he talked with her. She might be meddlesome and dictatorial, and was never happier than when attending to some one’s business, but she was so thoroughly good and kind and so sincere in her desire to help one out of difficulties that few could withstand her, and Jack was not one of the few. Pay her he must, but he consented at last to be her debtor for a time and to borrow more of her if necessary.
“She is a noble woman and I am glad you have her for a friend,” he said to Annie, when the interview was over. “She must have some of her brother’s magnetic power to twist me round her fingers as she did. You can’t do better than to be guided by her.”
One thing, however, she could not persuade Jack to do, and that was to go into the house at The Plateau.
“No!” he said decidedly, when she urged that there must be a first time, and it was better to do a disagreeable thing at once, and be done with it. “I cannot go there now. It would be like looking into my coffin.”
He would not even ride past it when Annie took him out to drive behind Black Beauty. Too many hopes of happiness were strangled there. “It is a haunted place to me. Later on, when I come back, I will go through it with you and see if the ghosts are there still,” he said, when she suggested driving that way.
Everything pertaining to the grounds and out-buildings was left in the care of Sam Slayton, who, having won golden laurels in his nursing, was earning golden dollars in his grocery, which had become very popular and, as Sam said, was patronized by all the e-lity in town. Annie was to have the keys of the house and to see that it was kept in order. Nothing was to be changed; nothing removed. At this point Miss Errington interfered. It was a shame, she said, to let a fine new Steinway be ruined by standing unused in a cold house all winter. Far better negotiate for its return, even at a discount on the price.