The colonel reached across the cards and tapped his aunt’s arm affectionately. He felt the warmest impulse toward sympathy for her that he had ever known; it glistened in his eyes. Mrs. Winter’s cheeks slowly crimsoned; she turned her head, exclaiming, did she hear a noise; but the colonel’s keen ears had not been warned. “Poor woman,” he thought, “she is worried to death, but she will not admit it.”
“Now, Bertie,” said Mrs. Winter calmly, but her elbow fell on her cards and spoiled a very promising game of Penelope’s Web, “now, Bertie, what are you keeping back?”
Then, at last, the colonel told her of his experience in Chicago. She heard him quite without comment, and he could detect no shift of emotion in her demeanor of absorbed but perfectly calm attention, unless a certain tension of attitude and feature (as if, he phrased it, she were “holding herself in”) might be so considered. And he was not sure of this. When he came to the words which stuck in his throat, the sentence about Miss Smith, she smiled frankly, almost laughed.
At the end of the recital—and the colonel had not omitted a word or a look in his memory—she merely said: “Then you think Cary Mercer has kidnapped Archie, and the nice-looking Harvard boy is helping him?”
“Don’t you think it looks that way, yourself?”
She answered that question by another one: “But you don’t think, do you, that Janet is the Miss Smith mentioned?”
His reply came after an almost imperceptible hesitation: “No!”
Again she smiled. “That is because you know Janet; if you didn’t know her you would think the chances were in favor of their meaning her? Naturally! Well, I know Cary a little. I knew his father well. I don’t believe he would harm a hair of Archie’s head. He isn’t a cruel fellow—at least not toward women and children. I’ve a notion that what he calls his wrongs have upset his wits a bit, and he might turn the screws on the Wall Street crowd that ruined him. That is, if he had a chance; but he is poor; he would need millions to get even a chance for a blow at them. But a child, a lad who looks like his brother—no, you may be sure he wouldn’t hurt Archie! He couldn’t.”
“But—the name, Winter; it is not such a common name; and the words about a lady of—of—” The polite soldier hesitated.
“An old woman, do you mean?” said Aunt Rebecca, with a little curving of her still unwrinkled upper lip.