“She's coming, and she'll get it out of Lorraine, and they'll all be down on us.”
Charles Edward and Aunt Elizabeth stood talking together, and just then I saw her put her hand on his shoulder.
“She's trying to come round him,” said Alice.
I began to see she was really in earnest now. “He's squirming. Oh, Peggy, maybe she's found it out some way, and she's telling him, and they'll tell you, and you'll think I am false as hell!”
I knew she didn't mean anything by that word, because whenever she says such things they're always quotations. She began to cry real tears.
“It was Billy put it into my head,” said she, “and Lorraine put it into his. Lorraine wanted him to write out exactly what he knew, and he didn't know anything except about the telegram and how the letter got wuzzled, and I told him I'd help him write it as it ought to be 'if life were a banquet and beauty were wine'; but I told him we must make him say in it how he'd got to conceal it from me, or they'd think we got it up together. So I wrote it,” said Alice, “and Billy copied it.”
Perhaps I wasn't nice to the child, for I couldn't listen to her. I was watching Charles Edward and Aunt Elizabeth, and saying to myself that mother'd want me to sit still and meet Aunt Elizabeth when she came—“like a good girl,” as she used to say to me when I was little and begged to get out of hard things. Alice went on talking and gasping.
“Peg,” she said, “he's perfectly splendid—Dr. Denbigh is.”
“Yes, dear,” said I, “he's very nice.”
“I've adored him for years,” said Alice. “I could trust him with my whole future. I could trust him with yours.”