“I know, Jasper—I know—but I dare not tell him. You cannot imagine what he is when he is really roused. He would turn you out.”
“Well, darling, and you would come with me. Why should we not go out?”
“In the first place, Jasper, you have no money to support us both. Why, poor, dear old thing, you are using up all your little savings to keep me going! And in the next place, even if you could afford it, I promised mother that I would never leave him. I could not break my word to her. Oh! it hurt much; but the pain is over. I will never leave him while he lives, Jasper.”
“Dear, dear!” said Jasper, “what a power of love is wasted on worthless people! It is the most extraordinary fact on earth.”
Sylvia half-smiled. She thought of Evelyn, who was also in her opinion more or less worthless, and how Jasper was wasting both substance and heart on her.
“Well,” she said, “I can eat if I can do nothing else ; but the thought of father dying of cold does come between me and all peace.”
She finished her dinner, and then went and stood by the window.
“It is a perfect miracle he has not found me out before,” said Jasper; “and, by the same token,” she added, “I heard footsteps in the attic up-stairs while I was preparing his fowl for dinner. My heart stood still. It must have been he; and I thought he would see the smoke curling up through that stack of chimneys just alongside of the attics. What was he doing up stairs?”
“Oh, I know—I know!” said Sylvia; and her face turned very white, and her eyes seemed to start from her head. “He went to look in mother’s trunks; he thought that I had got my brown dress from there.”
“And he will discover Evelyn’s trunks as sure as fate,” said Jasper; “and what a state he will be in! That accounts for it, Sylvia. Well, darling, discovery is imminent now; and for my part the sooner it is over the better.”
“I wonder if he did discover! Something has put him into a terrible rage,” thought the girl.
She went out of the kitchen, and stole softly up-stairs to the attic where the trunks were kept. It was locked. Doubt was now, of course, at an end. Sylvia went back and told her discovery to Jasper.
According to her promise, Jasper went that evening to meet Evelyn at the stile. Evelyn was there, and the news she had for her faithful nurse was the reverse of soothing.