Under the impulse of the request, before she had time to think what she was doing, the Butterfly told the banker what she had just seen and heard.
He was a big, commonplace, worldly man, whose head was never heated with super-mundane problems, yet he whitened as he heard this strange story.
“What was the woman like?” he asked.
“She was young and plainly dressed in a calico gown of an old-time mode, and she looked astonishingly like your son.”
The face of the banker whitened more and more and his eyes became glassy and fear-struck.
“That describes my first wife, Rob’s mother,” he said, “yet you did not know—no one here does—that he is not the child of my present wife. I was poor while she lived, so poor that she never had anything better than calico to wear.”
By that time Chrissalyn began to have a sheepish feeling about what she had done, and wished she were well out of it. A force that was resistless had impelled her to speak, but now that the tale was told, the impulsion gone and she became master of herself again, her first thought was that she had let out the secret of her ability to see things not within the range of common vision. So she attempted to make light of it, lest the banker go about telling it as a queer thing, and then the detested name of clairvoyant would be fastened on her in spite of everything.
“I dare say it’s all nonsense, and I hope you won’t think of it again,” which was as near as she could delicately come to saying, “I hope you will not speak of it.”
The stout banker mopped a cold perspiration from his face, with a good deal of nervousness. He was tolerably shaken up, and was making a wild effort to regain his equilibrium. Though not a man to go very deep into anything outside of finances, he was neither dogmatic nor unteachable. He knew what he didn’t know, which is a rare bit of wisdom, and in that territory were all things beyond the commonplace.
“Anyhow, whatever it was, Mrs. Layton, I’m obliged to you for telling me—more obliged than I can express,” he said, with unaffected earnestness—“and I will do as she wants me to. I will not turn Rob out.”