“You fit in like an odd scissor,” he said to her when they were alone. “Ain’t it most time to tell?”
“Not yet,” returned Marian. “I would rather wait until I am back at Redstone Hall. We are going there next month, and then, too, I wish I knew how much of Isabel’s insinuations to believe.”
“Isabel be hanged,” said Ben. “She lied I know, and mebby that letter was some of her devilment. Has she washed them curtains yit?”
Marian replied by telling him of the letter from Sarah Green and asking if he could explain it. But it was all a mystery to him, and he puzzled his brain with it for a long time, deciding at last that it might have come from some of her Kentucky acquaintance who chanced to be in New York, and sent it just for mischief.
“But they overshot the mark,” said he. “You ain’t dead by a great sight, and I b’lieve I’d let the cat out pretty soon. That makes me think you wrote that Spottie was here. Where is the critter? ’Twould be good for sore eyes to see her again.”
Marian went in quest of her, and on her return found Alice with Ben, who, in her presence, dared not manifest all that he felt at sight of his old friend. Taking the animal on his lap he looked at it for a moment with quivering chin; then stroking its soft fur, he said, with a prolongation of each syllable, which rendered the sound ludicrous, “Gri-mal-kin——poor gri-mal-kin,” and a tear dropped on its back.
“What!” exclaimed Alice, coming to his side, “what did you call the kitty?”
“Gri-mal-kin,” answered Ben, adding, by way of explanation, “that, I b’lieve, is the Latin for cat.”
Marian could not forbear laughing aloud, and as Ben joined with her, it served to keep him from crying outright, as he otherwise might have done.
“What are you going to do with it when you go South?” he asked, and upon Alice’s replying that they should leave it with Mrs. Russell, he proposed taking it instead and keeping it until Spring, when he could return it.