“Go home to your bed and pray,” ordered the stiff old lady contemptuously.
MacLachan regarded her gravely. “Fly, witch,” he said. “Awa' wi' ye on yer broomstick. I have a silver bullet for yer life.”
“Give me that pistol,” she directed and stretched out a hand for it.
Quietly but firmly MacLachan shot her. At the same moment Old Sally hit him expertly on the head with a bottle which she took from her market basket. MacLachan slumped forward and took his whirling thoughts carefully between his two hands. “I ha' done wrong,” he presently concluded. “I ha' murdered my aged an' respectable aunt in cold blood. Tak' my weepon an' hale me to the gallus.”
He passed his revolver over to a firm grasp. It was that of the Duchess. She was bleeding very slightly, the merest trickle, from the ear which MacLachan's bullet had grazed.
“Do not strike him again,” she bade Old Sally, composedly, and that faithful amazon dropped her bottle and lost fifty cents' worth of catchup.
“Come home before you get into trouble,” was the lady's command to the now cowed and repentant tailor.
Whimpering and rubbing his head, he suffered himself to be marched back to his Home of Fashion. So promptly was the retirement executed that Terry the Cop never knew (officially) what had taken place. Unofficially all of Our Square knew. And the following day a deputation of us marched MacLachan around to No. 17 to apologize. As we stood on the stairway awaiting her pleasure, we could hear Madam Rachel Pinckney Pemberton Tallafferr directing Old Sally to inform the deputation that she had not, to the best of her recollection, evinced any intention of receiving on that particular day, and that she sent her compliments to us, and was not at home.
“That's the high-toned way of saying she don't want to see us,” chirped the admiring Mr. Boggs between gratification and apology. “Aristocrat to the finger tips! Haven't I always told you so?”
He had, to the uttermost wearying of the flesh. But there came a time when he boasted less assuredly of his top-floor grandeur. To the little circle at the Elite Restaurant it became evident that something was preying upon the blithe spirit of the Angel of Death, something having to do with his Duchess. One evening, in a burst of confidence, he unburdened himself to the Little Red Doctor and me. Madam was, he feared, losing interest in the lofty social sphere to which she had been called. Seldom, nowadays, did she go in her full regalia uptown. Automobiles came no more to his flattered door. Worst of all, her fascinating mail had dwindled. Where formerly there would be as many as eight or ten envelopes per week, decorated with splendid and significant insignia and inclosing proud and stiff cardboard, now there was but one regular communication of the sort, the letter bearing the mystic double circle of the Spirit of Guidance Group and, as that was postmarked Brooklyn, Mr. Boggs had a small notion of its social import. Most of her days the aristocratic lodger now spent at solitaire, with Sempronius, the black cat, for critic. Mr. Boggs surmised sadly that the goddess of his top-floor Olympus was growing old.