"Ruin!" Jo repeated incredulously. "You mean we shall have—no money—at all?"
Mr. Morley glanced up at the girl and his face was haggard. He made a gesture of denial.
"I should not have said so much," he said after a pause and in a changed tone. "I am tired to-night and probably things seem worse to me than they actually are. We won't talk about it any more, poor Jo, poor little Jo."
Jo almost cried after that, and to save adding her tears to her father's already heavy burden ran from his presence up to her room where she buried her face in the pillows and wept long and furiously.
"That Andrew Simmer!" she cried, clenching her fist angrily. "What a scoundrel he must be! No wonder Dad looks savage when he speaks of him!"
Jo went downstairs no more that night, and when her mother came to her to ask why she did not join the family group as usual in the library, Jo pleaded a headache and said that she was going to bed.
She went to bed but not to sleep—not for many long hours afterward. In fact, the first shadowy light of dawn was creeping in at her windows before she fell into an uneasy, dream-tormented sleep.
The result was that Jo slept late and did not come downstairs until her father had been gone for some time. This was just as well, she thought, since her father could scarcely fail to notice the signs left by her sleepless night, the shadows under her eyes, the pallor of her cheeks. This would worry him and Jo wished more than anything in the world not to add to his burden of trouble just then.
From her mother Jo learned the rest of the story concerning Andrew Simmer.
"He seems to have been an extraordinarily clever young man," Mrs. Morley explained. "There are those who say now, in the light of later events, that he was more crafty and cunning than clever. Some even go so far as to say they think he was a bit touched in the head."