“None are so blind as those who will not see,” she said to him. “But if you think, Will Hartford, that a mouse ate that cake and then put the pan in the garbage can, I don’t.”
“But I don’t think anything of the kind, Letitia,” he protested, looking distressed. “Every now and then a tramp breaks into a house out here and eats what he can find.”
Tish gave him a terrible stare, and then she used an expression I had never before heard from her lips. “Some people are idiots,” she said, “and some are just plain fools,” and with that she stalked out of the room.
She called us together for a council of war, as she termed it, after he had gone to the train.
“Two courses are open before us,” she said. “We can leave the poor deluded imbecile to his fate, or we can take matters into our own hands. If the former, we must go; if the latter, that nurse must get out. I cannot be hampered.”
Well, after some argument we agreed to do whatever Tish suggested, although Aggie stipulated that Emmie, being her cousin by marriage, was to suffer no physical harm. Tish, on the other hand, demanded absolute freedom and no criticism. And this being satisfactorily arranged it remained only to get rid of Miss Smith.
As it happened, fate played into our hands that very morning.
The coconut cake had upset Emmie’s stomach, and the doctor sent some medicine for her. But Tish met the boy at the door, and, having instructed us to have the kettle boiling, was able to steam off the label and place it on the bottle of ipecac swiftly and neatly. Miss Smith gave her two doses before it began to act, but when it did it was thorough.
Well, Emmie was about as sick as any human could be and live for the next six hours. I suppose it was the first real sickness she had felt in ten years, and the fuss she made was dreadful. There was no use blaming a tramp for the coconut cake after it either. But what really matters is that she made them bring Will out from town. And between paroxysms she told him Miss Smith had poisoned her.
Miss Smith left that afternoon, but before she did she told Will that Emmie was as well as he was, or even better, and that the doctor knew it too. But if anyone thinks that Will believed her he does not know Will Hartford. All he did was to dismiss the doctor, too, and then come back to the kitchen and moan about the way people treated Emmie.