Carefully I let in the light, until, without a shock, Miss Axtell learned that the room below contained Bernard McKey.
"They did not understand me," she said, "or they would not have brought me here thus."
After a long, long lull, Miss Axtell thanked me for telling her alone, where no one else could see how the knowledge played around her heart. Dear Miss Axtell, sitting there, in my father's house, only last March, with a holy joy stealing up, in spite of her endeavor to hide it from my eyes even, and suffusing her white face with warm, rosy tints, dear Miss Axtell, I hoped your day-dawn drawing near.
Miss Axtell said "she hated to have other people see her feel"; she asked "would I manage it for her, that no one should be nigh when she met Mr. McKey?"
It was that very evening that papa, calling Sophie and me into his room, told us a little of the former history of the people in his house.
"I want you to help me, children," he said; "ladies manage such things better than we men know how to."
I said, close to papa's astonished hearing, "I know all about it; just let me take care of this mission"; and he appointed me diplomate on the occasion.
Sophie was strangely disconcerted; she had such fearsome awe of the Axtells, "she couldn't think of interfering," she said, "unless to make gruel or some condiment."
I coaxed Miss Lettie to have her tea in her own room: she certainly did not look like going down. Under pretext of having the care of her, I seated sister Sophie at my station, and thus I had the house, outside of the tea-room, under my control.
"Come down now; don't lose time," I said to Miss Axtell, running up to her, half breathless from my haste.