“Under no circumstances,” she says, “would Mr. Wiggins have threatened me with that. But then,” she adds, “Mr. Wiggins would never have put on those dreadful clothes and pretended to be something he wasn’t either. Times have changed, Lizzie.”
For it turned out, that very night, that Christopher was Billy Field.
Never, so long as I live, shall I forget that evening around Aggie’s bed, when Tish told her story. The bootleggers had tied her up at once, and even Lily May also. But Lily May was so quiet and chastened that they had weakened, after a while, and had let her loose.
“And then what did you do?” asked Charlie Sands.
“I amused them,” she said, not looking at Tish.
“I think,” Tish said in a terrible voice, “the less said of that the better.”
But it appears—for one must be frank—that Lily May saw that Tish was working with her ropes, and so she began to tell them stories. They must have been very queer ones, for Tish has never reverted to the subject.
“I told them the flapper story,” she said to Charlie Sands, “and that new Ford one, and the April-fool joke.”
Charlie Sands seemed to understand, for he nodded.