“Oh! I’ll fix that,” he said. “I’ll get her away from him.”
“I should be very glad to have you try,”—and Mrs. Forrest smiled slightly. Though she feared her brother’s displeasure, she nevertheless found a secret joy in his fallibility. He was not tolerant of other people’s errors, and it was gratifying to know that matters did not always run smoothly for him any more than for other human beings.
“If I were you,” she said presently, “I shouldn’t try to do anything about it. Zelda is not a child. We have no right to assume that Ezra won’t treat her well. And her father’s house is the proper place for her. We know that he’s an unpleasant person, but many of his fellow townsmen think him a paragon of virtue. Between us, we ought to manage to keep her a good deal to ourselves.”
“I don’t like it! I don’t like it at all!”
“But you’d better make the best of it. It wasn’t so easy to arrange as you think, and the situation has embarrassments either way. We don’t know her father. It’s been many a day since I set eyes on him.”
“Well, you may be right,” he said after a moment’s reflection. “Now that you’ve given her to him, I suppose I’ll have to take a hand,” said Merriam, with frank displeasure. “I’ll have to renew my acquaintance with that blackguard. I really suppose I’ll have to call on him, or I might meet him accidentally, in the street, or at the bank. I might make a study of his habits and then lie in wait. I should like to give an accidental air to the meeting, to save my self-respect as far as possible.”
There was in Merriam’s voice an even, hard tone that was not wholly pleasant; but his sister laughed.
“I suppose I might give a reconciliation dinner,” she said. “We might as well go into it deep while we are about it.”
Merriam shrugged his shoulders. “Don’t push matters too fast. I don’t remember Ezra as a good dinner man.”
He rested his arm upon a low book-case, looking down at his sister as she talked and drank her tea. It was quiet in their corner; the murmur of talk in the other rooms reached them faintly. Several times other guests came to the door and looked in on them and went away wondering, or perhaps saying to their friends that Mrs. Forrest and her brother, old Rodney Merriam, were holding a family council in the library, and that very likely it was about Zee Dameron.