"How?"
"That's telling!"
"You said you would tell me."
"And so I will, if you are strong enough to bear it."
"Well, I am."
"Don't go home for a week or ten days. Your folks won't know where you are. When they find out you went with me in a boat, they will think you are drowned; and when you go back, they will be so glad to see you that they won't say a word."
It would have been impossible for a girl who had been brought up by a loving mother to conceive of such a cold-blooded and diabolical proposition. Fanny had no mother, no father. Even the remembrance of the former had passed from her mind; and her father, while he was living, had been away from her so much that she hardly knew him as a parent. Her antecedents, therefore, did not qualify her to comprehend the loathsome enormity of the course she proposed to her companion.
"I can't stay away from home a week, let alone ten days," replied Kate, who, bad as she was, was shocked at the proposition.
"Yes, you can."
"Where shall I stay?"