“I must tell you fust of the hullabelloo there was in town when word come that the dets was awl to be pade, as soon as the clames was bro’t to Mr. Blake. Such a runnin’ of wimmen tellin’ the nuse was never seen since the run and the failure. One woman stood on her steps and yelled to the fokes passin’ up and down, four men rung the bell to call the fokes together, and Godfrey Sheldon come ni’ havin’ a fit, he was so tickled to get his money agin. Awl pade, every scent, by Mr. Lansing, they say, for of course you hain’t sung long enuff to git all that money, and fokes do say they’s somethin’ betwixt you an’ him. I hope to the land there is. He’s ’nuff site better’n that white-livered Herbert, who’s got to partin’ his hare in the middle and carryin’ a cain.”
Louie read no further than this before she burst into a paroxysm of weeping such as she had not known for weeks.
“Oh, this is too much! How could he?” she said aloud, and in a moment the he referred to had his arm around her, holding her so fast that she could not get away.
“Louie,” he said, “I think I know what Nancy has written, and I want you to listen to me a moment.”
She would not listen at first, but kept saying, “How could you? How could you?”
“Louie,” he persisted, “which would you rather do—owe a great many people, some of whom need the money, or, owe one who does not need it, and, if necessary, can wait forever? Try and consider yourself my debtor.”
His arm had tightened round her, and he was holding her very close to him as he talked, till gradually she grew calm and said:
“I know it is very kind in you, and few would have done it. But it will be so long before I can pay you, if I ever do, and that is very humiliating. I owe you so much already.”
Herbert had once said of Fred that if he were ever in love he would leap over the precipice without a thought of the consequences, and that was just what he did do. Without stopping to consider whether it were the time or the place, or Louie in a condition to hear him, he got both her hands in his, and held them while he told her how she could pay him, and that he believed he had loved her ever since the day when she worked so bravely to save his uncle’s bank.
“It certainly began then,” he said, “and has gone on increasing ever since, until now it will be very hard to give you up.”