Do you know, I really felt sorry I'd said it. But he is a cripple. Did he expect me to say he was big and strong and dashing—like Tom?
I left him there and got out and away. But do you know what I saw, Mag, beside his bed, just as Burnett came to put me out?
My old blue coat with the buttons—the bell-boy's coat I'd left in the housekeeper's room when I borrowed her Sunday rig. The coat was hanging over a chair, and right by it, on a table, was that big book with a picture covering every page, still open at that verse about
Through this same Garden—and for ONE in vain!
IV.
No—no—no! No more whining from Nance Olden. Listen to what I've got to tell you, Mag, listen!
You know where I was coming from yesterday when I passed Troyon's window and grinned up at you, sitting there, framed in bottles of hair tonic, with all that red wig of yours streaming about you?
Yep, from that little, rat-eyed lawyer's office. I was glum as mud. I felt as though Tom and myself were both flies caught by the leg—he by the law and I by the lawyer—in a sticky mess; and the more we flapped our wings and struggled and pulled, the more we hurt and tore ourselves, and the sooner we'd have to give it up.
Oh, that wizen-faced little lawyer that lives on the Tom Dorgans and the Nance Oldens, who don't know which way to turn to get the money! He looks at me out of his red little eyes and measures in dollars what I'd do for Tom. And then he sets his price a notch higher than that.