Hetty looked at the gold piece, but she did not offer to take it, and when Ethel doubled it with another piece she shook her head and whimpered reproachfully:
"It is too little; you must pay me more than that for keeping your dangerous secret! You were with your sister, miss, at the fortune-teller's when the fire broke out in the house. How was it you escaped and left her there? Why have you and she always kept the secret of your presence there—tell me that?"
The Parthian shaft told on Ethel. She recoiled with a gasp of terror from her accuser, and before she could speak Hetty followed up the advantage by adding:
"I think you'll own that a secret like that is worth more than a twenty-dollar gold piece, Miss Ethel, won't you? And I'm poor, and so is my young man. We want money to get married and start in life. A thousand dollars ain't much to you, with such a rich pa, but it'll be a mint of money to me."
"A thousand dollars!" gasped Ethel, then she whispered:
"Hetty, who has been telling you these falsehoods about me?"
"'Tain't false, Miss Ethel, it's God's own truth, no matter how I found it out. And unless you want me to out with it all to your pa and ma you must fork over a thousand dollars by to-morrow. I know you can do it. Mr. Winans will give you the money for your wedding fixings if you say the word. And I will come back to-morrow afternoon and get it."
The girl paused and looked at Ethel with a pleading air strangely at variance with her defiant tone, and in truth there was something of abject shame in her eyes as she waited cringingly for Ethel's answer.
"What if I refuse?" at length asked the young girl proudly.