I can't deceive her--
perhaps on her deathbed."
"Heaven forbid I should ask you, though I have been guilty myself!"
"You have been guilty?"
"I have sailed under false colors." I felt now as if I must tell
her that I had given her an invented name, on account of my fear
that her aunt would have heard of me and would refuse to take me in.
I explained this and also that I had really been a party to the letter
written to them by John Cumnor months before.
She listened with great attention, looking at me with parted lips,
and when I had made my confession she said, "Then your real name--
what is it?" She repeated it over twice when I had told her,
accompanying it with the exclamation "Gracious, gracious!"
Then she added, "I like your own best."
"So do I," I said, laughing. "Ouf! it's a relief to get rid
of the other."
"So it was a regular plot--a kind of conspiracy?"
"Oh, a conspiracy--we were only two," I replied, leaving out
Mrs. Prest of course.
She hesitated; I thought she was perhaps going to say that we had been
very base. But she remarked after a moment, in a candid, wondering way,
"How much you must want them!"
"Oh, I do, passionately!" I conceded, smiling. And this chance
made me go on, forgetting my compunction of a moment before.
"How can she possibly have changed their place herself?
How can she walk? How can she arrive at that sort of muscular exertion?
How can she lift and carry things?"
"Oh, when one wants and when one has so much will!" said Miss Tita,
as if she had thought over my question already herself and had simply
had no choice but that answer--the idea that in the dead of night,
or at some moment when the coast was clear, the old woman had been
capable of a miraculous effort.
Pages:
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122