“Mrs. Stirling and Jessie will arrive on the early train to-morrow.”
CHAPTER VIII.
WINDING A WEB.
When Miss Tuttle and Leola were alone together they talked over the news, and neither one was very well pleased, the girl, since their coming would break up her happy days with Ray, and the governess, because the Stirlings were always supercilious with her, and naturally made more work for the household.
“I do not see why I should put myself out to wait on pretentious fine ladies this warm weather, especially when my employer has not paid a dollar of my salary for five months,” she complained, and Leola added:
“There will be no more good times with Ray, for like as not they will join hands with Uncle Hermann in persecuting him, and try to have me marry old Bennett because he is rich. Oh, dear! I’m sorry Ray isn’t coming back to-night, so I could tell him not to come to-morrow.”
“You might send word to him in the morning before they come,” suggested Miss Tuttle, and Leola agreed to the plan, which would have worked itself out all right had not fate decreed that Leola’s little black messenger should lose the note and Widower Bennett find it.
He was riding briskly toward Wheatlands when his fine bay mare shied, wildly, at a square white envelope blowing about in the dusty road, and an impulse of curiosity made him dismount and pick it up.
When he saw Leola’s familiar writing on the sealed envelope, he was seized with such poignant wrath and jealousy that no scruple of honor prevailed to prevent his becoming master of the contents.
“To Ray Chester, the young dandy—wonder if she’s giving him the mitten as she did me yesterday!” he muttered, wrathfully, and broke the pretty seal of blue wax with a ruthless hand.