He got up and looked around him helplessly.
"Where'll I go?" he asked. "I can't go back to the shelter-house."
I looked at him and he tried to grin.
"Fact," he said, "hard to believe, but—fact, Minnie. She's got the door locked. Didn't I tell you she is of a suspicious nature? She was asleep when I left, and mostly she sleeps all night. And just because she wakes when I'm out, and lets me come in thinking she's asleep, when she has one eye open all the time, and she sees what I'd never even seen myself—that the string of that damned garment, whatever it is, is fastened to the hook of my shoe, me thinking all the time that the weight was because I'd broken my leg jumping—doesn't she suddenly sit up and ask me where I've been? And I—I'm unsuspicious, Minnie, by nature, and I said I'd been asleep. Then she jumped up and showed me that—that thing—those things, hanging to my shoe, and she hasn't spoken to me since. I wish I was dead."
And just then a dog barked outside and somebody on the step stamped the snow off his feet. We were both paralyzed for a moment.
"Julia!" Mr. Dick cried, and went white.
I made a leap for the door, just as the handle turned, and put my back against it.
"Just a minute," I called. "The carpet is caught under it!"
Mr. Dick had lost his head and was making for the spring, as if he thought hiding his feet would conceal him. I made frantic gestures to him to go into my pantry, and he went at last, leaving his hat on the table, I left the door and flung it after him—the hat, of course, not the door—and when Miss Summers sauntered in just after, I was on my knees brushing the hearth, with my heart going three-four time and skipping every sixth beat.
"Hello!" she said. "Lovely weather—for polar bears. If the natives wade through this all winter it's no wonder they walk as if they are ham-strung. Don't bother getting me a glass. I'll get my own."