The next morning, after breakfast, she and Jerome were alone.
"Jerome," Emily said in the voice that made him lay down his paper, and look up with serious eyes, "Jerome, I thought you were going to pay off mother's mortgage for her."
"Why, you said so, at the time, you remember."
"Well, when you got your thousand dollars from--"
"Oh, am I never to hear the last of that thousand dollars!" Garwood exclaimed, dashing his paper to the floor. "Must I always have that thrown up to me! I wish I'd never seen it!"
"It isn't that, Jerome, you told me you had paid mother's mortgage with it, that's all."
"You're mistaken there, I reckon, you must be mistaken. I said, perhaps, that I would pay it off with that, but not that I had. I did intend to, but I had to use the money in another place. I--" But he could proceed no further then. He was thinking of the big poker game in the Leland the night the state central committee met at Springfield.
Emily dropped the subject from her conversation, but she did not drop it from her thoughts. It was with her all that day, and it was the first thing in her mind the next morning, So incessantly did it recur to her, that, in search of relief, she went finally to the bank. She asked for old Morton, and when he shuffled up to the window, she made him go with her back to the directors' room, haunted as it was with memories of her father.
"They sell mortgages sometimes, don't they?" she asked as soon as they were alone.
"Yes, yes," her father's old clerk replied, delighted at being consulted confidentially in matters of finance.
"And could you get one for me, if I gave you the money, and told you the one?"
He smiled, as he had seen his superiors smile. It would be a treat for him to buy someone's mortgage. She told him, and he scratched his head a moment. "I think," he said, "that's over't the Polk National; I ain't sure now, but it seems to me--"
"Well, find out," said Emily, and the old man started.
"You spoke just like your father then," he said, in a mild, reminiscent way that touched her.
He managed the matter for her in the end, and she bought the mortgage by borrowing the money of one of her trustees, who said he was glad to advance it to her, though he was careful to take out the interest for himself in advance.